An Accidental Vacation in 1984
– Prof. Sreelata Jonnalagedda
IIM Bangalore
I discovered, during a brief visit to Yangon or Rangoon, the former capital of Burma, that Burmese Days was Orwell’s first novel. I left the country thinking about his other famous novel instead. I was not on a planned holiday but an accidental vacation to Burma, a country synonymous, for me, with Vipassana meditation. Seeing the land that made meditation its national occupation had not been on my list as much as doing the 10-day Vipassana course (one day, hopefully). Coming home from any travel makes me draw up a mental gratitude list. This time there was a surprise addition, and an existential one: democracy.
I was somewhat prepared for the political climate and the lack of media access, thanks to warnings from Google and ChatGPT itineraries. WhatsApp is banned in Burma, I’d heard, and I was glad of the excuse to abstain. But business is business. Within minutes of landing I had a new SIM, and the operator had installed a free VPN on my phone, WhatsApp, Instagram, most media restored. Most, except American outlets like the NYTimes, where my paid subscription now bought me nothing.
I began exploring the way I would anywhere in the world: places to see, restaurants to try, guided by social media and reviews. After a full day in Yangon though, I returned to the hotel underwhelmed. Tourists were few and far between. Guides and photographers were conspicuous by their absence, even at the Shwedagon Pagoda. When I asked the staff at my hotel, an international mid-range chain, to point me toward the city’s art and cultural scene, I watched my request pass down a chain of command until it dissolved into a blank, and something like fear: as if no one was sure they were allowed to answer. The restaurants had none of the life the reviews promised, in patronage, menu, or vibe.
Everything was functional on the surface. It was only when you looked deeper that the scratches surfaced. American media was unavailable, but BBC was, and it filled in what the streets and small talk would not. Military rule had replaced a ten-year democratic regime in 2021. The government pegged the currency at 2,200 Kyat to the dollar; the market traded closer to 4,000. There is forced conscription of the young, which explained the surveillance outside the airport, in place to stop them from leaving. University buildings looked deserted and dilapidated, faculty and scholars displaced from their safe spaces, I heard. Hoardings for international schools, however, were everywhere.
The general picture that emerged was bleak. With the democratic leader incarcerated and unable to rebel, insurgent groups too fractured to unite, and a young military-appointed leader gaining legitimacy through China, the hope for democracy looks distant and slim.
India is closer to Burma than we envision, culturally first of all. Advaita, the idea of non-duality, and Vipassana, seeing things as they truly are, may mean different things to different people, but their roots are identical. Burma is closer geographically too, sharing its borders with India and, in equal measure, with China. What would it mean for India if Burma founded and built its political base on Chinese ideologies? In this context, that Burma and India share a border may matter more than I ever gave it credit for.
Some in Burma are watching India closely. In the recent NEET protests and the ministerial resignation that followed, they read a longing of their own, for freedom of expression, for the rights of citizens and for the future of their young.
The irony I kept returning to: the world over, citizens seem to look westward in their longing for democratic ideals, while the ruling class looks eastward for power and control masquerading as efficiency and progress. It makes for a split vision of the world.
How does an ordinary citizen cope inside all this? Acceptance appears to be the chosen path, at least in Yangon.
Trying to explain my own dissonance: the gap between what the reviews described and what I saw, I went back to social media. The answer was simple: the reviews were too old to be relevant and too few to be statistically meaningful. Added to this, the calls on my local SIM began jamming and cutting out, and I uninstalled the VPN and cut myself off. So here it was, first-hand: a world where controlled information distorts reality, at least for a lay observer like me.
Orwell’s 1984 came to mind, precisely the dystopian fiction I’ve always avoided, because it felt too far from reality to be worth the gloom. Interestingly, on this trip it felt close and real.
As for the book, I plan to go back to it, most certainly for the sake of democracy. To go back to mulling over what would happen in the world absent with a space for voice — of the people, for the people, and by the people.
Source: The Shillong Times
