Unbeknownst to him, a coup had been announced on the radio, and a contingent of soldiers had came to his house to arrest him. He heard a soldier talked into his walkie-talkie, “We’ve got the maggot.” The words did not register with the prime minister immediately, “but when the soldier keep repeating “We’ve caught the maggot” , “it dawned upon him that the man was reporting his capture to headquarters, and the word “maggot” was the code name assigned to him. It seemed a big drop from prime minister to maggot. He smiled.”
A cabal of military men had ruled Burma uninterrupted since, and given the utter ruins that had been visited upon that country from that fateful days on, I often wonder why nobody – the best and the brightest in government and those in the political establishments outside it – foresaw what was coming and do something about it.
Sad to state, I never saw these kinds of questions get to a satisfying answer. Always a new rounds of events comes around to muddy the old ones.
In that sense, we are like the proverbial Swiss watchmaker who never get to assemble a single piece of a finished watch as he was frequently called to answer the doorbell of his workplace!
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