ျကိုးၾကာေတာင္ပံခတ္သံ is a book that is first recommended to me by my father after I have taken an interest in Burmese literature. The author is well known for his admirable, dependable, and almost unrealistic characters when it came to their virtues and ethics. He is fairly rife, and well-received among the youth readers crowd, which I believe is because his books contain motifs of romance, love and the meaning of one’s life. It would be a huge understatement to generalize him as strictly a romance author. The author is also a successful, acknowledged doctor and his experiences as a med student and of working in the rural areas of Myanmar has a huge impact on his work.
ျကိုးၾကာေတာင္ပံခတ္သံ is about a hardworking, self-sacrificial doctor who overseas a hospital in the rural town of Chin Taung, where he is essential because of the lack of well educated doctors in the area. Criticism about how his characters are somewhat unrealistic is swept away from my thoughts as I continue reading this book. Latt Nyein is while being portrayed as an almost mythical, hero-like doctor who is a perfectionist to a fault, is also a deeply flawed character with a dark past like the rest of us. I believe his flaws humanizes the revered, saintly doctor, and allows us to be in his shoes and to empathize with his worries. His backstory go stretching back to his med school days when he was just a clumsy, talkative student who is awkwardly in love with his best friend. While the love story is nothing original, I appreciate the effort he puts in humanizing to Latt Nyein. He puts various life lessons in the book, which I personally think is a good way to educated his youth audience with his words of wisdom.
This poison is the source for at least half the conflicts strewn all over social media between doctors and the general public nowadays. The overly-exaggerated ‘heroism’ of a fictional doctor and his fictional sacrifices -are nowadays, thanks to this book and its similars, expected as bare minimum for every real-life doctor in the country who has to live real lives and breathe real breath and eat real food which all includes the need to pay real bills and sometimes being prone to a tiny little thing called ‘burn out’ which tends to happen to real human beings when they’re overworked and under-appreciated. Best often used as an inside joke in the medical field really. I’m not gonna elaborate, you’re gonna have to ask an in-service doctor friend of yours what it means. Bye.