June 15, 2012 11:07 am
Aung San Suu Kyi: the woman who never sought to lead - The Guardian
One evening early this year in Rangoon, a 65-year-old woman went to the cinema – on the face of it an unremarkable occurrence. Except for the fact that the woman was Aung San Suu Kyi and the films she was watching, on a makeshift screen in a shopping mall, showed monks on the march, beatings by riot police, apparent abductions, and even firefights between ethnic minority militias and the army.
The screening was unprecedented; nothing like it had occurred in the 50 years since the military had taken power. Between 1988, when the democracy movement had first been bloodied in clashes with the authorities, and mid-2010, when change had begun to come, participating in such an event would have meant imprisonment, torture, possibly death.
Now, a second screen outside the hall relayed the images for a crowd of hundreds gathered on the pavement.
Among them was Ei Thu, a 28-year-old accountant. "I don't really care about politics but I love Aung San Suu Kyi. I don't care what party she is from. I want her to be president," she said.
The pro-democracy leader watched the images of violence and repression impassively. Only after the screening, when a young man, head of security for the youth wing of her National League of Democracy and one of Burma's best-known hip-hop artists, took the stage to perform did she smile. A measure of how fast Burma is changing is that the 31-year-old musician became a member of parliament in recent elections.
For a long time the world paid little attention to Burma. Aung San Suu Kyi may have enjoyed a global celebrity on a level with Nelson Mandela or the Dalai Lama but few people could pronounce her name or point on a map to the city where she lived. This too is changing.
Aung San Suu Kyi was born in 1945 in the middle of a war as British forces, aided by nationalists, ousted the Japanese invaders. Her father was Aung San, the rough-tongued, charismatic leader of the Burmese effort for independence from their imperial overlords.
This is, many say, the primary determining factor of her personality and her life. She delivered her first major political speech at a vast rally at the Shwedagon pagoda in Rangoon in 1988, beneath a giant screenprint of the father of the nation.
"It is difficult to overestimate the importance of her father, and what he did, for her," says Peter Popham, Aung San Suu Kyi's biographer.
Critics point out that she fits the familiar local profile of the dynastic heir to power. But though across much of Asia, the sons or daughters of colonial liberators or later leaders either hold high offices or are close to doing so, Aung San Suu Kyi, despite her background, never sought to lead.
A long-standing acquaintance said the influence of her parents explains why she accepted the role when asked to assume it, with all the sacrifices it would entail. Aung San was assassinated when his daughter was two years old and she was raised by her formidable mother.
"She was very strict, very hardworking … with high moral standards. If [Aung San Suu Kyi] got ambition from her father, she got a very strong sense of duty from her mother," the friend said.
A journalist remembered how, during a relatively frosty interview in the mid-1990s, the only question that elicited any warmth was about her mother.
Aung San Suu Kyi's upbringing was pure south Asian elite and this shows, at least in her icily correct interactions at the press conferences and functions she is now having to attend. First she attended one of the most exclusive schools in Burma. Then, when her mother was appointed ambassador to Delhi, she was sent to equally exclusive English-language institutions there.
The cool exterior is somewhat deceptive. Nirmal Khanna, one of her teachers in Delhi, remembers a "quiet modest girl who was a good debater".
Others remember a sharp wit. The philosopher Mary Warnock, who taught Aung San Suu Kyi at Oxford, remembered her as "totally untouched by the sexual aspirations of her friends, naive in a way, but sure-footed and direct in all her dealings … [who] found many things hilarious, not least her tutorials".
In 1972, after living and working in New York for the United Nations, she married Michael Aris, a Tibet scholar at the university whom she had met through mutual friends. Her marriage and domestic life in suburban north Oxford have given rise to what one acquaintance called the "myth of the housewife".
Though she pursued further studies and wrote, Aung San Suu Kyi did bring up children, darn socks and run grocery errands. But she was also, the acquaintance said, "still very conscious of being the daughter of Aung San". And from early on in their marriage, the couple were aware that one day the call of duty might separate them.
That call came when Aung San Suu Kyi was 42. Incompetent economic management over 26 years of army rule had impoverished most Burmese, despite their country being one of the most promising, resource-rich Asian nations.
In 1988, a series of demonstrations and strikes, often bloodily repressed, disturbed the country. By chance, she was in Rangoon, having returned to nurse her dying mother. As the daughter of the "father of the nation", she was the obvious choice to lead the disparate protesters.
Reluctantly but inexorably, she was drawn in. She helped found the National League for Democracy and threw herself into campaigning. Her husband and sons returned to Britain without her.
In July 1989 she was placed under house arrest for the first time. The results of elections in 1990, won categorically by the NLD after energetic campaigning, were ignored.
The pro-democracy leader remained imprisoned – largely under house arrest in her rundown family home on the banks of Inya lake in Rangoon – for the best part of the next two decades. There was an assassination attempt, periods of ill health and a spell of detention in the terrible Insein jail.
One witness remembered Aung San Suu Kyi and Tin Oo, a highly decorated senior soldier and pro-democracy activist, attacked by government goons in Rangoon in the mid-90s: "Their car had its windows smashed and Tin Oo came out bleeding and shouting. But Suu stepped out very composed, her face just a tiny shade paler than normal.
"Despite hundred of thugs nearby with knives and sticks she stood on a stool in the street and briefly spoke her usual message about how everybody has to work for democracy, and warned supporters not to react to the violence and to go home peacefully. As if nothing had happened."
Aung San Suu Kyi saw her husband for the last time in 1995 when he visited Burma four years before his death from cancer.
The regime had made it clear that she could travel overseas whenever she wanted, but it was also clear that she would not be allowed to return. "She has been attacked for being cold or unfeeling but she couldn't show the regime she was suffering. Her anguish was genuine and profound," said Popham, the biographer.
In November 2010, three years after a new wave of bloodily repressed protests dubbed the saffron revolution and to the surprise of virtually all observers, Aung San Suu Kyi was released. The regime appeared to have decided that, to preserve any power and wealth, they needed Burma to partake in the rapid local economic growth. This, the argument went, was impossible while under sanctions and without an element of political reform.
Despite the challenges Aung San Suu Kyi now faced as leader of the democracy movement, "there was a lightness to her", said one reporter who interviewed her shortly after her release. Others describe her as "mischievous, funny, relaxed".
Since, though the reforms have been steadily consolidated, an election held which saw her gain a seat in parliament and sanctions suspended, "the Lady" appears more, rather than less, careworn.
The question now being asked is whether the strength of character and determination that saw Aung San Suu Kyi through the decades of detention will serve her as well in the complex, fast-shifting new political environment.
There is also a concern that she has become the personification of Burmese democracy and this is dangerous.
"If the west put the whole focus on [Aung San Suu Kyi] that could be very misleading. We trust in her and her intuition but this is all happening very quickly," U Win Tin, one of the founders of the NLD, told the Guardian in January.
And how will Aung San Suu Kyi, who has repeatedly said she detests being described as a saint or an icon, cope with the adulation she will receive this week? On Thursday she appeared to bend over in pain before vomiting at a press conference in the Swiss capital, Bern.
"I don't understand why people say that I am full of courage. I feel terribly nervous," she told journalists.
"It's a duty," said the friend, who requested anonymity fearing Burma's still powerful security agencies. "I expect she will visit her husband's grave [in Oxford] but the emotional side will be sealed off.
"She is a very private person after all, a bookworm really, she once said. So she protects herself."
Potted profile
Born: 19 June 1945
Age: 66
Career: Campaigner for democracy and human rights
High point: Release from house arrest in November 2010 and successive subsequent releases of Burmese political prisoners
Low point: Separation from and eventual death of her husband from cancer in 1999
What she says: "It is not power that corrupts but fear. Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it and fear of the scourge of power corrupts those who are subject to it."
What they say: "Her grace and forbearance despite all she has been through is a lesson to us all" Desmond Tutu
Vodafone pounds the pavement to test signal strength - Crave
Vodafone has taken to the streets to reveal how it tests phone signal in hard-to-reach places. From shopping centres to offices, pedestrian testers are roaming Britain equipped with special phones that automatically call, text and surf the web -- all in the interest of maintaining those crucial signal bars.
James Watt is one of Vodafone's network of pedestrian testers, roving smart phone-toting ramblers testing signal strength in the areas where signal-sensing vehicles can't reach. Replicating the experience of a typical Vodafone customer, Watt and his fellow testers roam stations, shopping centres, sports stadiums, airports and offices.
Neatly tucked away in a tester's backpack are five specially modified identical smart phones running apps that test signal strength, call quality and mobile data. The phones are constantly making and receiving phone calls, downloading web pages, uploading files and sending emails.
While the phones automatically log data to Vodafone's servers, the pedestrian tester charts his day in a notebook, before consulting detailed maps numbering the set places that need to be monitored.
James Watt walks up to 8 miles across London in a day -- enough rambling to knock off more than a stone in his six months on the job. And he's not alone: six teams of pedestrian testers are out pounding the pavements of 24 other towns and cities every day, covering as many as 115 locations a month.
How's the signal round your way? Are there any inexplicable bar black holes in your town or your home? Signal your thoughts in the comments or on our Facebook page.
Malls liven up DSS with prizes, offers - Khaleej Times
The group has been a key sponsor of the DSS since its inception, running innovative events and activities that have helped brand Dubai as a shopping paradise in summer months. “The DSMG is always on the lookout to offer customers increasingly exciting promotions during the DSS, as this is in keeping with our mandate to re-energise the mall industry in Dubai and promote shopping and retail trade.
Children try out their painting and drawing skills at Modhesh World at the World Trade Center . — KT photo by Juidin Bernarrd
Dubai, as a shopping hub, has always been the first choice for shoppers, making it the quintessential value shopping destination. It is even more significant now when the UAE is surveyed to be the world’s second largest international retail market having a presence of 56 per cent international retail brands. This year, we are pleased to launch Dh3 million worth of prizes that fully complement the action-packed DSS being organised by the Dubai Events and Promotions Establishment (DEPE),” said Majid Al Ghurair, chairman of DSMG.
The DSMG guarantees surprises and fun-filled activities for all its shoppers during the DSS. Shop for Dh200 at any of the participating malls to receive a coupon from the mall that you have shopped to enter in the mega raffle. The malls are: Al Ain Centre, Al Ghurair Centre, Al Manal Centre, Al Mulla Plaza, Arabian Center, BurJuman Centre, Century Mall, Deira City Centre, Dubai Outlet Mall, Hamarain Centre, Ibn Battuta Mall, Lamcy Plaza, Mall of the Emirates, Mirdiff City Centre, Oasis Center, Palm Strip, Reef Mall, Sunset Mall, Times Square Center and Twin Towers.
A Weekly Mega Draw beckons prizes in cash and as gift vouchers worth half a million dirhams to four winners during the promotion period. The raffle draw is scheduled for June 21 and 28 and July 5 and 14. A Weekly Regular Draw will reward 20 winners with prizes worth Dh50,000 with five winners in a week getting prizes in cash and as gift vouchers.
As part of the joint promotion, MasterCard offers additional chances of winning to shoppers using MasterCard every time they shop. The promotion entitles shoppers using MasterCard to win five Emirates Airline return tickets to a destination as a weekly Mega Prize. The draws are held in conjunction with the DSMG raffle draw on June 21 and 28 and July 5 and 14. In total, 44 winners will get a chance to live it big this summer festival.— news@khaleejtimes.com
Zoomingo’s new Android app makes shopping decisions a little bit easier with ‘Hot or Not’ style game - GeekWire
Zoomingo released an Android version of its shopping app this week, the one that lists things on sale from more than 70,000 retailers to make comparison shopping easier, faster and to help you snag the best deal. It also includes the game “Hot or Not,” where you rate the deals for a chance to win weekly prizes. The company reports that more than 1.5 million deals have already been rated by the app’s iPhone users and has put the “Hot or Not” game into the top 25 in its category at the Apple App Store.
Perhaps one of the sexiest features of the app is this, according to the company: “Zoomingo remembers your store preferences and tastes and organizes and informs you of the most relevant sales.”
Zoomingo’s backstory may have a familiar and funny ring to it: Co-founded by Krishnan Seshadrinathan and Shirish Nadkarni, it was Nadkarni’s wife who provided much of the inspiration for the app. Nadkarni found her shopping habits of hopping from store to store to score the best deals “time-consuming and frustrating,” according to the company’s bio. Hence, the app. Making weekend spousal shopping excursions hopefully less painful for everyone involved.
You can find Zoomingo at the Apple App Store and Google Play. Of course, you still need to go to the store to score the deal. We can’t wait for the app that teleports the goods directly to your doorstep.
Nadkarni, a well-known Seattle entrepreneur who previously co-founded Livemocha and TeamOn Systems, raised $1.3 million from Benaroya Capital and others last fall.
JCDecaux wins Leeds shopping mall ads contract - Media Week Online
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JCDecaux, the outdoor media owner, has been awarded the £4m seven-year digital outdoor advertising contract for Trinity Leeds, the Land Securities shopping mall set to open in central Leeds next year. JCDecaux's rival Clear Channel, which recently won a ...
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