A Revolutionary Saint (or) A Saintly Revolutionary?written by Ludu Sein Win

It is a little over 5 years since he had left this mundance world leaving behind his loved ones and his beloved people. But usual with his personality of his calibre he was well remembered and well commemorated. He was too much of a heavy weight to be easily forgetten. He was indeed physicaly a heavy weight and also a heavy weight in media and literary field. This was well accepted throughout his corner and throughout his life. But there are many who did not realise that he also was a heavy weight in revolutionary and political movements of our country.


Since his youthful days, he was in the forefront of Burma's political renaissance care 30's and 40's. He participated in every anticolonial movements, political and cultural as well. He was always at the progressive side. He was always seen together with progressive young men. He was also an active supporter of the antifacist resistence and after the war he was a founding member of the AFPFL Front.
After Burma gained her independence, he fully devoted his life in media and literary world. Although he had a heavy responsibility as a founder publisher and editor of a highly respected newspaper, he had never failed to fill the gap in the litarary field. He wrote many books for the children and adults as well. His Folks Tales series were not merely series of bed-side tales for the children. They were Laboriously collected, compiled and publisshed with the nobel aims of acheiving mutual understanding and respect among many indigneous races of the country. His prison series were among the best of that calibre ever written, much much better than world famous Nehrus' Letters. They were full of life, terribly realistic, highly humanistic and exceptionally compassionate. Compassionate is the trade mark of him. We could him a compassionate uncle who always tolerated with understanding and far-sightedness, the aggressiveness of the angry young revolutionaries. The young revolutionaries mistook his far-sightedness and torlerance as ineptness. Some even thought that he as just a conservative reformist. They totally forgot about the fact that many if not the most of the present day leading progressive writers and poets were nurtured and guided and promoted by him.
The years between 60's and 70's were years of wars- aggressive wars and resistant wars, oppressive wars and revolutionary wars. The whole world at the brink the 3rd World War. At that time, we youngsters thought that every revolutionary must hold arms and we did not pay high regard to anyone who never hold arms. At that time we never thought about the fact that our ideal revolutionary writer Lu HSun had never in his entire life held arms as a weapon for his revolutionary activities. And yet he was called a flag-bearer of the Chinese revolution, by a person no other than Moa Tse Tung himself.
We youngsters are reluctant to accept him as a revolutionary. Indeed he was a great revolutionary, but he was not a revolutionary of common sense. He was a revolutionary with a Saint's heart. We mistook his generous words and mild manners and his farsightedness as conservative. And yet we all loved him as an uncle. But among ourselves we just thought him as a revolutionary Saint- a saint but revolutionary. We did not believe at that time a saint even though revolutionary might not be a fellow- traveller up to the end of revolution.
But he in fact was not a revolutionary Saint. As the saying goes "actions speak louder than words" his work and his deeds in every sphere of our country's political and literary field vividly showed that he was a saintly revolutionary but not a revolutionary Saint.

Ludu Sein Win

[လူထုခ်စ္သမွ် လူထုဦးလွ- ဒုတိယတြဲ၊ ပထမအႀကိမ္၊ ၂၀၀၀ခုႏွစ္၊ ဇန္န၀ါရီမွ ကူးယူေဖာ္ျပပါတယ္။]