In an interview with the Yangon Press International, a Facebook newsgroup, Zarganar recalled how the presiding judge and prosecutor who sent him to decades in prison for engaging in unlawful online communications knew nothing about the Internet.
“The government prosecutor asked me to give my e-mail account,” Zarganar said. “When I told her my account was …@gmail.com, she said she was asking for my ‘e-mail’ account, not my ‘Gmail’ account.”
The judge later asked Zarganar where he conducted his communications with exiled activists such as Moe Thee Zun and Aung Din. In response, Zarganar explained that he would chat with the dissidents on Meebo, an instant social networking service that was widely used in Burma at the time because Gmail was banned. In Burmese, however, the word “chat” means cooking and “meebo” means fire stove, so when Zarganar told the IT-clueless judge he would chat with the activists using Meebo, the judge thought the comedian was having fun at the court’s expense by saying he would cook with the activists over a wood stove. “I explained that Meebo was an Internet social networking platform, but the judge could not understand what I was saying and got angry,” Zarganar said. “So how can the kind of judge who has never used the computer hand down such sentences?”
2011.10.14 The Irrawaddy - Burma’s Charlie Chaplin Picks Up Where He Left Off