Word: nu
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...deep down inside him suddenly changed ... A cool moonlight night, a verdant prospect, pretty women, sweet music began to move him profoundly. Whenever he was moved by beauty, he wanted to be alone with his joy." The picture of a Burmese society girl, ripped from a newspaper, was U Nu's talisman, inspiring him "to do good deeds, champion the weak, subdue the oppressors...
...University of Rangoon, where he graduated in philosophy, U Nu wrote sonnets, "mostly to lampoon rival football teams," and read avidly-Shaw, Shakespeare, Havelock Ellis, Karl Marx. Then he became a schoolteacher, wrote some plays with Freudian themes, and directed his sonnets at Mya Yi, the school board chairman's daughter, with whom he later eloped. Under the spell of a learned Rangoon editor named U Ba Cho, the young playwright got interested in both Buddhism and his country's fight for independence. The zealotry of his politics and religion astonished his friends...
...Friends. The fight for freedom was a young man's fight: Burma's middle class and middle-aged were standing aside, and the University of Rangoon's young radicals could go far. U Nu re-entered the university as a graduate law student. One year later he was leading the celebrated Students' Strike of 1936, burning the Union Jack before Rangoon's colonial Law Courts. U Nu joined the intensely nationalist "We Burmans" Society, whose members defiantly called each other "Thakin" (or "master"), the word the British expected subservient Burmese to call the white...
When World War II came, Burma's young Thakins offered to help the British if they would guarantee Burma's independence. The British coldly declined, so the Thakins supported the Japanese. The British later threw U Nu and his friends into jail for sedition...
...Japanese invaded Burma, and the people, believing that the Japanese had come to liberate them, crowded out to greet the soldiers. "When the Japanese bombers came," said U Nu, "the people would not take cover. They tore their shirts, sang, danced, clapped their hands, shouted and turned somersaults as if they did not care a curse what happened." One day U Nu came upon a procession, led by monks, bearing gifts of rice, bananas and melons to the Japanese soldiers. Several hours later, U Nu met the same procession, limping home and disillusioned. "We expected the Japanese commander...