If you want to see Calcutta as it was in the 1950s, visit Rangoon. With its crumbling Victorian buildings and leafy boulevards, Rangoon feels like a backwater, and in many ways it is. Burma's post-colonial history has not evolved as has happened elsewhere in the South Asian subcontinent; the architecture and politics are frozen in time.
Burmese democrats seem confident that their day is coming, but the Rangoon junta is busy establishing military and economic alliances. Meanwhile, returned Indian exiles are back in business.
Burmese democracy was barely 14 years old when it died in 1962. That year, Prime Minister U Nu, friend and confidante of assassinated freedom fighter Aung San, was toppled by General Ne Win in a coup. Ne Win plunged Burma into isolation and stagnation: one of the richest and most-promising regions of the British empire at independence, virtually disappeared from the political and economic map. Ne Win's "Burmese way to socialism" brought the country to its knees.
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