Rangoon Calling

Rangoon Calling

Episode #579: “I did not expect to be conversing in Urdu with someone in Yangon.” Bilal Hassan, a Pakistani creator and doctor, traveled to Burma after noticing how much of Karachi’s everyday culture carried unexplained Burmese traces: khao suey, family names, old songs about Rangoon, and stories no one could quite complete. His trip began as a search for those missing links, but Yangon gave him something more complicated than recognition. The city felt to him like the place where South Asia and Southeast Asia meet, with Urdu-speaking caretakers at Bahadur Shah Zafar’s shrine, Surti and Memon mosques tied to Karachi business families, Tamil and Chulia Muslim institutions, halal food, and Burmese Muslim cuisine shaped by migration. Yet those familiar traces existed inside a post-coup country marked by checkpoints, fuel shortages, surveillance, airport controls, and a visible gap between wealth and hunger. A roadside woman near Bago had only white rice to offer, while a hotel buffet back in Yangon complete with French champagne cost dozens of dollars. The deepest tension came through Muslim life itself. Downtown Yangon looked visibly Muslim in ways Bilal had not expected, but when the subject of Rohingya was broached, it changed the air in the room. Some Muslims distanced themselves; others admitted fear and sadness but refused to keep speaking. Bilal came to see Muslim communities as connected, careful, and guarded, maintaining names, food, language, and religious life while learning how not to stand out. He left resisting both tourist denial and headline simplification. Burma was not only a war zone, not only a beautiful country, and not only a forgotten extension of South Asian memory. It was all of those at once, and the connections he found could not be separated from the silences people used to survive.

Past the Commentaries

Episode #578: Aye Myat Thwe is a Burmese lay Buddhist practitioner raised inside the Mahasi Vipassana world, where devotion, meditation, and study were braided into ordinary family life. Watching her grandmother sit daily, she grew up assuming the classic Burmese hierarchy of authority was stable and complete, the commentaries as canon, Abhidhamma as the tradition’s intellectual summit. For years, she accepted that inheritance without friction. Then scholarship cracked it open. Learning that Abhidhamma may not be the Buddha’s original teaching shocked her, not because it erased its value, but because it revealed how much Burmese certainty is cultural as well as doctrinal. Once that door opened, she began questioning everything, and felt the social cost of doubt in a society where deference and inherited interpretation can outweigh inquiry. Her widening view extended to lineage identity. Early impressions, shaped by polemics against Pa Auk, taught her suspicion before she had direct experience. Later, encountering Mogok and Pa Auk more honestly, she came to see these traditions as parallel approaches rather than rivals, with conflict often generated by institutional competition and the anxieties of authority rather than by founding masters themselves. She also rethought the role of samathā and “powers,” recognizing both the risks of misuse and the legitimacy of deep concentration when ethically grounded. And she became attentive to how communities code-switch about cosmology, sometimes muting supernatural discourse to appear rational or modern, even while insiders quietly acknowledge it. The Rohingya crisis then forced an ethical reckoning. She saw how fear of protecting the Sāsana could override compassion, and admits she stayed quiet under communal pressure, turning blame inward. After the coup, the fractures deepened. She believes Burmese Buddhism’s future depends less on defending institutions than on recovering moral credibility and everyday application, a reform that keeps roots while refusing corruption.

A Border Runs Through It

Episode #577: Thomas Shapwon, a Naga elder and former politician, recounts the long struggle of the Naga people for sovereignty and survival between India and Myanmar. He describes the Naga as an ancient, independent nation with distinct language, culture, and traditions. From the formation of the Naga Club in 1918 to the declaration of Naga independence in 1947— one day before India’s own— the community has resisted external domination. Mahatma Gandhi supported their independence, but his successor, Prime Minister Nehru, rejected it, eventually dividing the Naga homeland along the India-Myanmar border without consultation. Shapwon explains that the Naga people have traditionally lived under village councils with no kings or centralized rulers, embodying a democratic, republican ethos. He traces their ancestry to Mesopotamia and describes their migration through China before settling in the region. Christianity, brought by American Baptist missionaries, became central to Naga identity, with 95% of the population now Christian— a fact Shapwon sees as a potential bridge for international support. He emphasizes peaceful advocacy over armed resistance, using careful language: the Naga, he says, “request” recognition of independence rather than “demand” it, asserting equality rather than subjugation. Yet he acknowledges the armed movements that arose after Indian and Burmese military aggression in the 1950s, which forced the Nagas to form their own militias. The Burmese army’s campaigns of violence and forced Buddhist conversions devastated Naga villages, while internal divisions— fueled by politics and drug infiltration— further weakened their cause. Despite assassination attempts and near-death experiences, including a bear attack he survived through what he interprets as divine intervention, Shapwon remains devoted to peace. Through his NGO, the Eastern Naga Development Organization, he promotes education, healthcare, women’s empowerment, and opium eradication. Reflecting on the post-coup era, he calls for cooperation with other ethnic groups and envisions a future decided peacefully by the Naga people themselves.

The Hidden Flock

Episode #576: “I have been attempted [at assassinations] twice when they shot me, but I escaped. My family, my brother, they are targeted, and armed groups are always behind us. They kill in a second.” Peter Saiful, a pastor with the Rohingya Christian Fellowship and a human rights defender, describes what it means to live as a Rohingya Christian refugee in Bangladesh after his family fled Myanmar in 1992. His account centers on a community he estimates at around 3000 Christian individuals in Bangladesh, dispersed across camps where concealment becomes a survival strategy rather than a choice. In blocks dominated by Muslim majorities, he says, Christians often cannot identify themselves safely, and “now they are pretending to be Muslim,” because discovery can bring abduction, beating, torture, and ransom. Saiful argues that the primary engine of fear is not the broader Rohingya population, but small armed factions with outsized power. A group of “very few people [are able to] control the Rohingya, because [the armed groups] have access to weapons that we cannot imagine,” leaving the majority too frightened to speak out. He traces this environment into specific violence, including attacks culminating in January 2020, when he says more than 400 youth set fire to Christian shelters, destroyed documents, and injured community members. On repatriation, Saiful rejects near-term promises as unrealistic, pointing to continuing flight from Myanmar and the lack of enforceable guarantees, while still insisting on belonging and citizenship rights, warning that without equal treatment and access, any return risks repeating a cycle in which Rohingya are moved and renamed for other people’s purposes. “The government must ensure us that [they will] welcome us as a child, the way we welcome our children,” he says, and without that, he expects the same cycle will repeat and “we will be treated as a football.”

Terms of Extraction

Episode #575: Lindsey Kennedy, an investigative journalist and documentary filmmaker focused on organized crime, corruption, and conflict, argues that the scam-compound economy across Cambodia, Myanmar, and Laos can no longer be treated as a marginal criminal problem. It has become a governing force in parts of the region, shaping infrastructure, labor flows, border management, and even the logic of war. “They are not a separate organized crime phenomenon. They are a core part of the economic activity of a country.” Her account widens the frame far beyond online fraud. Inside these compounds, people can be trafficked through fake job offers, trapped behind guarded walls, tortured for missing targets, sold between operators, or pushed into sexual exploitation. Many do not even realize which country they have been taken to until they arrive. “People are completely tricked into working somewhere they have no idea what's happening.” Others enter under economic pressure and discover too late that there is no easy line between coercion and consent once the system closes around them. Kennedy is especially focused on state responsibility. These industries do not grow into cities without permissions, land access, military or police protection, and a wider network of businesses willing to build, transport, finance, and normalize them. “They just cannot take root without state sponsored backing,” as she puts it. Casinos, special economic zones, and new fintech platforms help move and launder money while giving criminal infrastructure the appearance of development. In Myanmar, those same criminal economies blur into conflict itself. Armed groups need revenue, illegal industries expand, and even landmine contamination becomes harder to address when crime, territory, and war finance overlap. Survivors, meanwhile, are left with little support. “There's not a lot of thought for aftercare,” Kennedy says, pointing to a system that recycles people through exploitation rather than helping them exit it. What emerges is not a hidden underworld but a visible structure of power—one that continues to expand and harden.