Punches, headbutts, knockouts: Asia’s ‘new’ martial arts sensation By Justin Calderon, for CNN (CNN) — It’s been more than 20 years since he fought in a sandpit, but Lone Chaw still recalls the dusty village lots of his youth, unmarked except for footprints stained by sweat and blood. Stamping about in a ritual known as “lat… Read More Now »
The Padauk Blossoms At Thingyan
By: Harry Hpone Thant
Soon it will be Thingyan again. Most people know Thingyan as water festival time, the weather is unbearably very hot and dusty and everybody who ventures out onto the road is greeted with a bucket of water over his head or ambushed by jets of water from children lucking by. Actually, Thingyan is the Myanmar New Year and celebrated all over the country.
It is also the time for April showers to make the Padauk blossoms bloom and perfume the air with their delicate scent. The Padauk flower usually blooms at April when Myanmar celebrates their Newyear Water festival. Usually, yellow bright flower blooms all around Myanmar with very sweet smell and people’s offers to Buddha images and women also attached that yellow bright flower to their hair. Pterocarpus Macrocarpus (Burma Padauk Pan) is a species of Pterocarpus native to southeastern Asia in northeastern India, Burma, Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam.
By: Harry Hpone Thant Tabodwe (January-February) is a cool month in Myanmar. A Myanmar saying goes “so cold as to freeze the tips of the buffalo’s horns”, that is how cold it gets in the central parts of the country in Pyatho(January) and Tabodwe(February). But it is also the time when the first harvest is… Read More Now »
Thadingyut is a seven-month of Burmese calendar and the end of lent. Three days of lights festival, namely the day before full moon, the full moon day, and the days after. Illuminations are there to celebrate the anniversary of Buddha’s return from the celestial abode where He had spent the lent teaching the celestials about… Read More Now »
By:Â Harry Hpone Thant
Wagaung corresponds to the Christian month of August. It is the period when the monsoon rains reach Upper Myanmar and Ayeyarwady Rivers is full, stretching from one bank to the invisible bank on the other side. It is also the time when the waters of the Ayeyarwady River reach the small village of Taungbyone in Madaya Township, Mandalay Division.
Also this is the time of one of the most famous Nat (Spirit) Festival in the country, the one that dates back to the Bagan Dynasty, nearly 2 centuries ago.
By: Harry Hpone Thant A girl’s face with a yellowish paste on her cheeks will always provoke a question from a foreigner: What is that they put on their faces? That is Thanaka paste, the most environmentally friendly and widely used skin lotion in Myanmar. No chemicals, no preservatives, the lotion that helps our skin… Read More Now »
By: Harry Hpone Thant Kyezu Kabar Sai Yaw (Thanks Be To You) Since the dawn of time, people had thanked Mother Earth for providing them with food and shelter. Communities hold ceremonies to mark and thank Mother Earth for the bountiful harvest she had provided for the previous year and to pray for the same… Read More Now »
By: Harry Hpone Thant
The blue waters off the Tanintharyi coast of Southern Myanmar are home to a race of people called Salone in the Myanmar language. Also known as Moken, they are a nomadic people. They roam the seas in their fragile canoes looking for sea cucumbers, pearls and otherwise searching the sea bed for their livelihood. Even the deadly sea urchins with their prickly and poisonous spikes are handled with ease by them. The Salone families hop from island to island, making their canoes their home, never touching land except when the seas get rough during monsoon time. All their worldly possessions are piled in their small boats, not excluding the household dogs even, as they wander from one deserted island to another as their forefathers had done thousands of times in as much years. And this had earned them an epitaph as Sea Gypsies.
Listeners turn to foreign genres, rejecting folk songs often associated with the military regime. A school, though, is scrambling to save what’s left of a rich tradition.
LOS ANGELES TIMES | A Times Staff Writer
U Tin cut his teeth as a musician playing Burmese folk songs for silent movies, which in this time warp of a country remained popular well into the 1950s.
The 80-year-old recalls the challenge of playing guitar, watching the conductor and looking at the screen simultaneously, four shows a day. Periodically they’d mess up the sound effects, leaving the audience to wonder why a bang occurred well after the gunfight ended.
“Some of the band leaders were quite drunk, particularly by the late show,” he said. “But we managed.”
Today, he sits on his well-worn floor surrounded by memories and his beloved string instruments lined up like sleeping maidens.
With minimal encouragement, he grabs a sort of battered hubcap attached to a cricket bat, his homemade banjo, and croons a folk song about a girl from Yangon worried about keeping her skin fair.
By: Harry Hpone Thant
Since the emergence of civilizations the Earth has been the provider of both food and shelter for the humans. In return festivals are celebrated annually to thank and return the favors of Mother Earth for the bountiful harvests. These festivals and celebrations are held in many forms by various communities and clans on earth mostly after harvest times.
One of these is the New Year Festival held annually in January by our Naga cousins who live on the high mountain peaks of northwestern Myanmar. Many Naga clans live on these high mountains, scattered in small villages and hamlets but they always come together at New Year time to celebrate their New Year at a designated town in what is known as the Naga Hills.