I used to make deals with Buddha. It was simple. I prayed, donated things in front of Buddha statues and asked for things. I asked to pass my exam with distinctions, I asked for a better phone, I asked for things for my parents, I asked for so many things that I can’t remember. So, I can say proudly that I’m an experienced deal maker. It’s one of the most valuable skills if you are a Buddhist. My...
I was staring at this girl in the mirror who appeared to have dropped from a freak show somewhere in the City Market. The girl was me and I was in the beauty parlour of a then well-known make-up artist in Yangon. In a couple of hours, I was supposed to be leading the procession of the bride and groom in front of about a hundred people. It was my cousin’s wedding. I was to be the bridesmaid, so...
Nobody likes to be wrongly blamed for something another person has done. A lot of us have experienced the nauseating feeling of mistakenly being accused of something we didn’t do. It’s gut-wrenching and it could take away your appetite. Because of how awful it feels, most of us don’t do it to another person. Yet, we do this to ourselves all the time. We blame ourselves for something someone else...
I love hearty meals but I hate cooking dishes that take more than a few minutes of preparation. I also tend to stock my fridge with random produce rather than with specific ingredients for pre-planned meals. As long as they are fresh and healthy, I throw them into my fridge and figure out how to eat them later. With my lawless approach to meal planning, I’ve never had the right ingredients to...
My parents have a big garden that houses varieties of plant and animal lifeforms including five coconut trees. These lofty trees tower over different corners of my parents’ property, as if standing guard over the premises. Their smooth slender trunks are completely free of leaves, right until the very top, where swishing branches of long needle leaves make them look like space creatures with...
It was the year 2005. I was sitting in a ground-floor internet café in downtown Yangon researching universities in the US, UK and Singapore, the three countries I’d shortlisted to go to. I was also applying for scholarships and collecting materials to practise for the IELTS language test. I used Google to research those things. Nothing surprising there. But under the iron grip of the dictatorial...
These days, people are very creative in celebrating the New Year. They launch their money into the sky and watch it burn, exploding into pretty patterns which they can admire for all of 10 seconds. And they get to strain their ear drums into the bargain. Since I don’t have money to burn, I just have to find other ways to be equally creative. This year, I spent the change-over from 2018 to 2019...
I have a habit of overthinking things to the point where sometimes my mind starts thinking by itself without me. Quite often, it has managed to circle the moon a few times before I notice that my mind has gone out of my body again and I have to heave it back to earth. In one of those moon trips that my mind took recently, it struck me that I can learn a lot from cats. They are one of my favourite...
In my lifetime, I haven’t had much in the way of physical illness. The most serious setback I ever had was when I dislocated a bone in my hand and had to spend 6 months in a plaster cast. I’m lucky that I have always been healthy. But even though my body hasn’t suffered many afflictions, my mind has. It has been so full of bugs and loopholes that I failed to realize I needed to release updates...
I was flat on the floor with my head bowed, forehead nearly touching the ground and my legs tucked under me. I didn’t look up until the monks had sat down on the mat in front of the Buddha statues. It was my birthday. I was dressed in traditional Burmese clothes, sitting on the floor with my palms together in front of my chest, a gesture that I’d learnt ever since I was aware of my being. The...