5/23/22, 1:44 AM Discipline and duty - New Mandala the match. After a little while I asked him if he’d heard anything about the people who beat up the demonstrators. ‘Yes! Remember the fire across the river a few weeks ago?’ I said I did and looked around for his older brother, who could verify that I’d called that night. ‘After the fire we prepared a lot of curry to donate to them. Duck egg curry. But when we arrived they already had a lot of food. Pork curry. They didn’t even eat our duck egg curry; they were feeling too oily.’ One of my favourite Burmese words is the one used to describe the feeling after eating too much oily food. I thought maybe I’d lost the thread of the conversation. But on Facebook I’d seen this area across the river mentioned as the home of some red armband thugs, so I hung on. ‘Then today, we heard that those same guys are the ones hitting the students. So we don’t want to donate to them anymore. Maybe we should have given them that pickled mango!’ Pickled mango is an especially nice condiment when you are eating too much oily food. Had I lost the thread again? I wasn’t sure if he’d just deployed an impressively executed punch line or if he meant to emphasize that people on the other side of the river were being taken care of better than 8,000 kyat. I asked him about the two men in the photos. Htoo Lay doesn’t use Facebook but he said he’d heard about them and explained who they were. His brother’s match ended. We made plans for me to join him and the others for donations to a monastery on Sunday and then I walked the rest of the way home. That night, 85 miles from Yangon, students were still barricaded in the monastery. Today, a friend showed me the front page of a daily newspaper. Some of the red armband thugs want to apologize, said the headline. They are being shamed by the whole country, she said, and also their own communities. In the article, a resident of the village across the river where there had been a fire said, ‘People who donated to us will feel they have been watering a poisonous tree.’ I guess Htoo Lay would agree. One of the thugs said he had not known what he was being called to do. The story also quoted his pregnant wife. She does not want people to tell their child that its father is a bad man. ‘I wonder if this is the power of social media,’ I said to my friend. I said it in English with the lazy grammar that can sound like a question but isn’t, really. When we got back to the office that afternoon, another friend showed us a photo on Facebook. A row of dead bodies in monk’s robes. A grainy photo with a caption saying that they had been killed by Muslims. Other posts had other captions and more photos, showing the wreckage of a bus on the highway. Tonight, the students are barricaded in a monastery outside Yangon. Matt Schissler is based in Yangon, where he manages the Myanmar Media and Society (M.MAS) Research Project for St Antony’s College, Oxford University. https://www.newmandala.org/discipline-and-duty/ 3/3