Zarganar's friend, the painter and performance artist Htein Lin, managed to talk to him last night, and Zarganar passed on his thanks to all those who campaigned on his behalf.
I caught up with him on the phone at fellow actor Zin Waing's house. I told him how our three year old girl was a paid up member of the campaign to free him and had been shouting "Free Zarganar" since she was barely two.
He asked me to thank everyone throughout Europe who had been working on the Free Zarganar Campaign, and organisations like Equity, PEN, Index on Censorship, Amnesty, Freemuse, the Bremen Solidarity Prize, Prix de Droits de l'Homme, and Freedom to Create who had recognised him and other prisoners in Burma. He told me he was looking forward to renewing acquaintance with director Rex Bloomstein who made the documentary "This Prison Where I Live" and meeting -- at least virtually -his fellow comedian Michael Mittermeier for the first time.
We were very pleased to speak again, but both of us will be much happier if the tally of political prisoner releases goes higher than the 185 or so we saw today, and hits the 2000 mark.