A letter to myself

Dear (future) me , 

I know what you have been through and what you have done in your life. You have had  highs and lows , success and failure , love and hate , happiness and sadness. 

I simply do not know what you will be and where you end up in the future but I am sure that you will be finding your way to make yourself happy and be happy with who you will be and what you will be doing. 

Do not let others define you and do not let others to get you down. You are who you are and it's amazing to see you being YOU. 

I know and I believe in you that you will never ever ever follow money and success without a genuine happiness. 

Money is not important at all in your life. It may sound cliché but it is THE truth. Clichés exist for a reason. Do not ever think that money is the only thing that will make you happy. 

Be more positive! I know it's not easy to be positive sometimes but be aware that positivity can (probably) bring you peace to some extent which is a important factor of being happy. 

Thank you in advance for everything you will be doing. I expect the unexpected and I am very excited for you and for your future. 

Yours , 

(present) me

23:28 , 16 Aug 2015

New Burma and its Social Media

Burma, a country that was ruled by the military regime isolating from the rest of the world for nearly 6 decades is now opening its doors allowing its people to connect with the outside world by different means.

Once very difficult procedure even to get a passport for an ordinary citizen restricting people getting one like having to go through what they called ‘’Education Clearance’’ which as I understood was some amount of money you had to pay back to the government for its education services that were offered to you throughout your life when you intend to leave the country and right when you apply a passport (no matter if you intend just for a short day vacation to Bangkok , 45 min fly away from the former capital, Rangoon) , is now eased to a great extent in which you can have your passport within 10 days thru a very much simpler procedure without any particular restrictions.

As country is opening up, Burmese are now able to easily be in contact with other people of the world even though there are still some constraints for ordinary people to travel internationally with regards not only to financial incapabilites but also to some visa requirements which has always not been a problem at all for some of the developing countries in the region. For instance, before a recent visa exemption agreement between Burma and Thailand which has come into effective only earlier this month of August, Burmese used to apply for a tourist visa at Thai embassy in Rangoon which you either get in line since early morning (could be as early as 3 am) to lodge your application or have it done overnight by a travel agent with some significant amount of money as a fees.

Given the constraints and circumstances Burma have in place, Burmese people tend to use the benefit of Technology to be able to connect to the outside world which to most of the Burmese generally means their families and friends working or studying overseas. The recent established foreign telecommunication companies such as Telenor or Ooredoo has been playing lately a very important role in the communication sector of Burma which is one of the poorest in the region. With their affordable SIM cards and fast internet connection, people in Burma are now accessible to Internet.

Everyone has got mobile phones and can stay connected. With the help of Technology, people became familiar with social networks and media. Even a stay-home mom who had no clue what the internet was and never touched a computer is now connected via her smartphone and is able to see what’s happening throughout the country and beyond. Many people including older generation are now reading news on their smartphones accessing the news media websites and facebook pages.

Younger generation become very active on social networks, mainly Facebook as Twitter is not very popular here in Burma for some reasons. Youths express themselves from their Facebook pages and actively participate in commenting, discussing and sharing different contents on the internet.

As the news appear very fast on social media, Burmese are also very keen to receive and share news online. News and media agencies has now grown a habit of putting the latest news on their Facebook pages and people became so very familiar with that that people go online and check their Facebook pages to get the news rather than waiting to get the full story from traditional printing media even without any desire to go check to the actual websites of the news agencies. I even saw some people copied-and-pasted the news article from the website on the comments of Facebook post so that other people won’t have to go to the website to attain the information.

There are also immense amount of faux news and misleading information being created and widely shared on social media especially of the news about the politics and religions which already are very sensitive topics to talk about in the country.

Also with little or no knowledge of privacy, (or even lack of) intellectual property rights and laws and regulations on the Internet (Facebook for vast majority of users), there is a great potential risk for misuse such as cyber bullying, grooming and abuse by online predators, identity theft and exposure to inappropriate content including self-harm, racist, hate speech and many more which of course are the threats not only to Burma but also to the world nowadays.

A lot measures and education are being very much needed to take place in the country just like almost every sector of the country as it is trying to open up and tempting to become a fast growing country in the region and catch up with the rest of the world. I hope Burma will be growing safe and sound.

What is life ??

Life has always been defined by everyone in every possible way throughout our history. Some define life as a journey. Some as a path. Some as living a rich and successful life. Some as just nothing. Sometimes, we all have that moment when we have to think what life is all about. And find out that we are living the life that has nothing to hold onto or many things to stick around.

Life defines us sometimes. All the things you have been doing in your whole life consciously or unconsciously make you the person who you are today whether which you like it or hate it.

Sometimes, you have that nuclear-like energy and you feel like you can do anything in the world. But sometimes, you ain’t got no courage, bravery, inspiration, hope, nothing at all. All you want to do is to give up, ummm not really giving up but you don't want to do anything for anyone including yourself. You just wanna be in the bed for all day long doing absolutely nothing. And that's okay if you feel lost once in a while. There is nothing wrong with that.

What’s “life’’? what defines life and what is a meaningful life?? I simply believe that life is just a life, just a period between the day you were born and you die. You gotta deal with it whether it's tough or easy.

To me, a meaningful life is a life where you enjoy yourself and accept who you are and accept others for who they are. Helping others as much as you can help you define yourself and see yourself even more. Helping others makes you realize that you are something and you have what it takes to lead to a meaningful life on your own. The life that you defined yourself not by the others. And you feel yourself and you let yourself free. That's the most wonderful and amazing feeling ever to get to know yourself and to accept it with pleasure.

Then your life is good and meaningful to yourself which I think is the most important thing in life.

ျမန္မာမ်ား ျပင္ဆင္စရာ ၂

ဆက္ေျပာရမယ္ဆိုရင္ 

အဂၤလိပ္ စကား အသံုးအႏႈန္း ေတြပါ 

မႊတ္ေနေအာင္ ေျပာတတ္ဖို႔ မဟုတ္ပါဘူး ေလ့က်င့္မ်ားရင္ ရသြားပါလိမ့္မယ္ 

ဒါေပမယ့္ အသံုးအႏႈန္းေလးေတြကို သတိထားရပါမယ္ 

ဟိုင္း တို႕ ဟယ္လို တို႕ ေဟာင္း အာ ယူ တို႕ မေျပာဘဲ ျမန္မာ ပီပီ တိုက္႐ိုက္ႀကီး စေျပာလိုက္တာက အိုးတို႕ အမ္းတန္း ျဖစ္ေစပါတယ္ 

ၿပီးေတာ့ ျမန္မာ လိုေတြ ဘာသာ ျပန္ၿပီး စြတ္မေျပာမိေစဖို႕ပါ မသိရင္ သူတို႕ ဘယ္လိုေျပာလဲ နားေထာင္ၾကည့္ ေမးၾကည့္ပါ ရွက္စရာ မလိုပါ ႏိုင္ငံျခား ဘာသာစကား ကို ေျပာရတာ မွားတာ မသိတာ မေတာ္တာ ေတြ ပါမွာ ပါဘဲ အဲ့တာ ကို မွားရင္ မွား မွန္းသိၿပီး ျပင္ႏိုင္မွ အဆင္ေျပမွာပါ 

ဥပမာ ကိုယ့္ လုပ္ေဖာ္ကိုင္ဖက္က ဝင္လာတယ္ ကိုယ္က စီးၿပီး ေျပာထည့္လိုက္တယ္ 

"ဝွက္ ဒူး ယူး ဝမ့္ " တဲ့ ဟို က ဘာျပန္ေျပာ ရမွန္း မသိဘူး 

"ဝွက္ ဒူး ယူး ဝမ့္ " ဆိုတာ မင္း ဘာလိုခ်င္လဲ ဘာလုပ္ခ်င္လဲ ဘာလာ လုပ္တာလဲ ဆိုတဲ့ အဓိပၸါယ္ ေရာက္ပါတယ္ ရန္ျဖစ္ေတာ့မယ့္ ေနရာ မွာ ဂ႐ု မစိုက္ တဲ့ ေနရာမွာ မွ သံုးတာ ပါ 

ဒီေနရာ မွာ ဟိုင္း ေတြ ေဟာင္းအာယူေတြ ေျပာၿပီးမွ အဲ့တာ ကို ေျပာရင္ေတာင္ ေတာ္ေသးတယ္ 

ဒါေပမယ့္ what can i help you or what brings u here ?? အဲ့လို မ်ိဳးေလးေတြ ေျပာ ရင္ ပို ေကာင္း ပို ယဥ္ေက်း ပို သဘာဝ က်မွာပါ 

ၿပီးရင္ အီေမးလ္ ေရးတာ ျဖစ္ျဖစ္ စကားေျပာတာ ျဖစ္ျဖစ္ please , could you , can you , would u mind စတဲ့ စကားလံုးေလးေတြ ေျပာတာ ပို အလုပ္ဆန္ လူႀကီး လူေကာင္း ဆန္ေစ သလို ကိုယ္ အဂၤလိပ္ စာ တတ္ေၾကာင္း တစ္ဖက္လူသတိထားမိေစပါတယ္ 

သူမ်ားႏိုင္ငံေတြမွာ ေစ်းဆိုင္မွာ ေစ်း ဝယ္ ရင္ စားေသာက္ဆိုင္ေတြ မွာ စားပြဲထိုးေတြ နဲ႕ စကားေျပာရင္ေတာင္ please တို႕  thank you တို႕ လိႈင္လိႈင္ သံုးရတာပါ 

ကိုယ္နဲ႕ အလုပ္လုပ္ သူေတြက အဂၤလိပ္ စကား ကို မိခင္ဘာသာ စကား အေနနဲ႕ မေျပာလို႕ ခုန က ဟာေတြ မရွိရင္ ေတာင္ ကိုယ္ က အရင္ေျပာေပးပါ ကိုယ္ ယဥ္ေက်းေၾကာင္း စကားေျပာ လိမၼာ ေၾကာင္း ျပရာ ေရာက္ပါတယ္ 

တျခား ဘယ္ အလုပ္သြားသြား ဘယ္ လူမ်ိဳး နဲ႕ လုပ္လုပ္ အထင္ေသးမခံရမွာပါ 

မယံုမရွိနဲ႕ ကိုယ္ေတြ အဲ့လို ယဥ္ယဥ္ေက်းေက်း ေျပာေနလို႕ မခ်ီး က်ဴးရင္ သာ ေနမယ္ ။ မေျပာလို႕ကေတာ့ တိုးတိုး တစ္မ်ိဳး   က်ယ္ က်ယ္ တစ္ဖံုအတင္းေျပာ လိမ့္မယ္ 

ေနာက္ တစ္ခု က အီးေမလ္ ဖတ္တာ ျပန္တာ ျမန္ေအာင္ ေလ့က်င့္ယူပါ 

အီးေမးလ္ ဆယ္ခုေလာက္ ရွိတာ ကို အမ်ားႀကီး လို႕ ညည္း ေနမယ့္အစား ျမန္ျမန္ ဖတ္ ျပန္စရာ ရွိတာ ျမန္ျမန္ ျပန္ လိုက္ပါ 

အၿမဲတမ္း မဟုတ္ေတာင္ အီးေမးလ္ ခ်က္ခ်င္း ရ ခ်က္ခ်င္းဖတ္ ခ်က္ခ်င္း ျပန္ ျဖစ္တာ က အက်င့္ ေကာင္း တစ္ခု ပါ 

ျမန္မာ ေတြ မွာ ေတြ႕ ရတာ က အီးေမလ္း ေတြ ကို ဆယ္ေစာင္ အေစာင္ ႏွစ္ဆယ္ ေလာက္ ရွိမွ  စု ဖတ္ၾကတယ္  ၿပီးရင္ ဖတ္ၿပီး ခ်က္ခ်င္း မျပန္ဘူး အီးေမးလ္ ထဲ က လုပ္ရမွာ ေတြ ကို အၾကာႀကီး လုပ္ၿပီး အားလံုး ၿပီးမွ ျပန္တာေတြ ေတြ႕ေနရတယ္ 

အေရးႀကီး တာ က သူ ပို႕ တဲ့ အီးေမးလ္ ကို ကိုယ္ ရေၾကာင္း သူ လိုခ်င္တာ ကို ဒါမွ မဟုတ္ ကိုယ္ ေပးရမွာ ကို ဘယ္အခ်ိန္ အၿပီး ေပးမယ္ ျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း အရင္ အတိုခ်ံဳး ေမးလ္ျပန္ ေပးရမွာပါ 

ၿပီးေတာ့ ေမးလ္ ေတြကို အကုန္ ခ်က္ခ်င္းဖတ္ပါ ၿပီးရင္ ျပန္စရာ ရွိတာ ကို ရေၾကာင္းေျပာတာ အျပင္ ျဖတ္လို႕ရရင္ ခ်က္ခ်င္းျဖတ္ လိုက္ပါ 

ဥပမာ အီးေမးလ္ တစ္ခု က ေသာၾကာေန႕ ဆယ္နာရီ အားလား မအား ဘူး လား ေမးထားတယ္ ဆိုပါေတာ့ ကိုယ့္ အခ်ိန္ဇယား ကိ္ုယ္ၾကည့္ အားရင္ အားေၾကာင္း မအားရင္ မအားေၾကာင္း ခ်က္ခ်င္း ျပန္လိုက္ပါ 

အဲ့အီးေမးလ္ ေအာက္ဆံုး ေရာက္ေနလို႕ ေနာက္ဆံုးမွ ျပန္မယ္ မလုပ္ပါနဲ႕ တစ္ခ်ိဳ႕ က ရွိပါတယ္ အီးေမးလ္ျပန္ တာ ကို သက္သာ မွာ ဆန္ထုတ္ သလို ေကအက္ဖွ္ ဆီ မွာ တန္းစီ သလို အရင္ လာတဲ့ အီးေမးလ္ အရင္ ျပန္ေနတာ ပါ 

အဲ့လို မလုပ္ပါနဲ႔ တစ္မိနစ္ေလာက္ နဲ႕ လုပ္လိုက္ရင္ ျပန္လိုက္ရင္ ၿပီးတဲ့ ဟာကို (အေပၚ က ဥပမာမ်ိဳး) အရင္ လုပ္လိုက္ပါ 

အီးေမးလ္ ျပန္ရင္ asap ေတြ ဘာေတြ ျဖစ္ႏိုင္ရင္ မသံုးပါနဲ႕ ခုေခတ္က ျမန္ေလ ႀကိဳက္ေလ ေခတ္ ကိုယ္ လုပ္ႏိုင္တာ ကို ၾကည့္ လိုက္ ၿပီးရင္ စာ ျပန္လိုက္ ငါ ဒီေန႔ အၿပီး လုပ္ေပးႏိုင္မယ္ မနက္ျဖန္မွ လုပ္ေပးႏိုင္မယ္ စသည္ျဖင့္ အခ်ိန္အတိအက် ေျပာေပးပါ ပိုၿပီး အလုပ္ဆန္ သလို တစ္ဖက္လူ က လဲ ေလးစားမွာ အမွန္ပါ ။

ခုေျပာခဲ့တဲ့ဟာေတြ က ျမန္မာေတြ အကုန္ မလုပ္ ဘူး ႏိုင္ငံျခားသား သူ ေတြ က အကုန္ ေတာ္ ဒီလို ေတြ လုပ္ေနတယ္ လို႕ မေျပာပါ ဗ႐ုတ္သုတ္ခ ႏိုင္ငံျခား သားသူ ေတြလဲ တစ္ပံု တစ္ပင္ ပါ အဲ့ လို ဗ႐ုတ္သုတ္ခ ေတြ ေတြ႕ရင္ အတုယူ မမွားေအာင္ ကိုယ္က ျပင္ေပးႏိုင္ေအာင္ ေျပာျပတာ ပါ

ျမန္မာမ်ား ျပင္ဆင္ စရာ ၁

ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံ မွာ ေနာက္ဆို ရင္ ႏိုင္ငံျခား ကုမၸဏီေတြ အဖြဲ႕ေတြ အခုထက္ ပိုမ်ားၿပီး ေရာက္လာၾက မွာ ဆိုေတာ့ ျမန္မာ ေတြလဲ ကိုယ့္ဘာသာ ကို ေနလို႕ မရေတာ့ဘူး သူမ်ားေတြနဲ႕ အလုပ္ ေတြ လုပ္ရေတာ့မယ္ ၿပိဳင္ဆိုင္မႈေတြ ရွိလာမယ္ 

တျခား ပညာရပ္ပိုင္း ဆိုင္ရာေတြ ရည္ခ်င္းေတြ ျဖည့္တာ ကလဲ ျဖည့္တာေပ့ါ အက်င့္ပိုင္း ဆိုင္ရာေတြ ေျပာပံုဆိုပံု ျပဳမူ ပံုေတြ လဲ အမ်ားႀကီး ေျပာင္းလဲ ရမွာ ကို လဲ သတိမူေစခ်င္တယ္ 

အေတြ႕အၾကံဳ မ်ားတာနဲတာနဲ႕ မဆိုင္ပါ စာဖတ္တာ မဖတ္တာ နဲ႕ ကိုယ့္ ပတ္ဝန္းက်င္ကို ၾကည့္တတ္ျမင္တတ္ ေလ့လာတတ္တာ နဲ႕ အမ်ားႀကီး ပို ဆိုင္ပါတယ္ တစ္ခ်ိဳ႕ဆို ေမြးကတည္း က ႏိုင္ငံတကာ ကုမၸဏီ အဖြဲ႕အစည္းေတြ မွာ လုပ္လာလဲ အခ်ိဳးမေျပေရႊက်င့္ ေတြ မေပ်ာက္ေသးတာ ေတြ တစ္ပံု တစ္ပင္ ႐ိုက္သတ္လို႕ မကုန္ပါ

ပထမဆံုး အေျပာအဆိုေတြ ကိုယ့္ဘာသာ ျမန္မာေတြ အခ်င္းခ်င္း ေျပာေနတာေတြ က ဘာမွ မျဖစ္ေပမယ့္ သူမ်ားေတြ နဲ႕ ယွဥ္လုပ္ရၿပီ ဆက္ဆံ ရၿပီ ဆိုရင္ ႏိုင္ငံတကာ က လက္ခံ ထား တာေတြ မသင့္ေလ်ာ္ တာေတြ ကို သိထား နားလည္ထားရမယ္ 

ကိုယ့္ ျမန္မာ ႏိုင္ငံမွာ ျမန္မာ ဓေလ့ ဘဲ ကြာ လုပ္ခ်င္တာ လုပ္မယ္ ဆိုရင္ေတာ့ ျမန္မာ့ ဓေလ့ ဆိုက္ကား နင္း အေၾကာ္ေရာင္း ပဲျပဳတ္ေရာင္း ပြဲရံု သြားလုပ္ေလ ေနာ္ 

အမ်ားဆံုး ေတြ႕ရတာက သူမ်ား တကာေတြရဲ႕ ႐ုပ္ပိုင္းဆိုင္ရာ ေတြ ကို ေပၚတင္တစ္မ်ိဳး ကြယ္ရာ တစ္ဖံု ေဝဖန္ ေျပာဆိုတာ ပဲ ။ ဥပမာ လူတစ္ေယာက္ က ဝေနတယ္ ဆိုပါေတာ့ "ဟယ္ နင္ ဝလာတယ္ေနာ္ / ေဟ်ာင့္ မင္းဝလာတယ္ေနာ္" ဆိုတာ က ျမန္မာ ဓေလ့ အေနနဲ႕ ႐ိုင္းတယ္ လို႕ မေခၚေပမယ့္ တျခား ဓေလ့ ေတာ္ေတာ္မ်ားမ်ား မွာ ႐ိုင္းတယ္ လို႕ ယူဆ ၾကတယ္ ။ သူ႕ဘာသာ ဝ ဝ ပိန္ပိန္ ဘာပဲ ျဖစ္ေနေန ေဝဖန္မႈ မျပဳ ရဘူး လို႕ နားလည္ထားၾကတယ္ 

ဒီမွာေတာ့ အခ်င္းခ်င္း ေျပာတာ အက်င့္ ႀကီး ေတြ ပါၿပီး သူမ်ား ေတြကို တိုက္႐ိုက္ႀကီး ေတြ သြားေျပာေတာ့ ဟိုက လူေတြ က ဘာျပန္ေျပာရမွန္း မသိ ဒီက လူေတြ ေတာ္ေတာ္ ႐ိုင္းတာဘဲ လို႕ ထင္ ဒီက ဓေလ့ ဆိုတာ သိသြားသည့္တိုင္ ဒါမ်ိဳးေတြ က ဒီအဆင့္အတန္းေပါ့ေလ ဆိုၿပီး ပါးစပ္ က ထုတ္မေျပာေသာ္ လည္း စိတ္ထဲ ဘဝင္ မက် မွာ အမွန္ပါ ။ 

သူတို႕ မ်က္ႏွာၾကည့္ ေနရမယ္ လို႕ မေျပာပါ ( ေရႊမ်ိဳးခ်စ္ေတြ က ေသာက္တလြဲ အဓိပၸယ္ ေကာက္ေနမစိုးလို႕) ကိုယ္နဲ႕ အလုပ္ တူ လုပ္သူခ်င္း ခ်စ္ခင္ ၾကည္ျဖဴ နားလည္ မႈ ရွိတာ က မရွိတာ ထက္ ပိုေကာင္း တယ္ ဆိုတာ သူငယ္တန္း ကေလး သြားေမးေတာင္ သိပါတယ္ ။

ေနာက္အခ်က္ေတြ ေနာက္မွ ဆက္ေရးပါ့မယ္

My personal Golden Rules on Facebook

my personal Golden Rules on Facebook 

1) Never add a total stranger as a friend 

2) Never get myself other name without any apparent reason 

3) Never post/share/comment/like anything racist 

4) Never tag anyone in anything without proper reason 

5) Never believe in anything on Facebook (or any other social media) without screening and researching myself

Words to remind myself

Different people have different opinions and ideas. 

You cannot expect everyone in the whole damn world to come together and be united as one. 

But it's crucially important that you know how to respect other opinions and ideas and beliefs. 

I always remind myself that I cannot agree on what others say all the time and every other people cannot (cannot) agree on what I say. And it is okay , perfectly fine. 

What you have been taught , learned , told might be very different towards the others and you should not (absolutely not) think the others wrong. They are just different and it does not mean they are wrong or you are right. 

Some people are kind while others are mean. Some people are helpful while others are ignorant. Some people are flexible while others are strict. Some are wise while others are dumb. 

Every one has their own good and bad. Don't judge others because you do not know what they have been going thru.

What I know or what you know is just as little as a rain drop in the ocean. 

There is no such thing called Eternal Truth. Do not hold on only one thing