I learned this when I was among the 40 plus admirers who went to listen to his 2 hour talk in Chiangmai today (28 May 2011). And he was speaking Burmese to boot.

He started with the question how he came to be in Thailand with a funny story he must have read somewhere, as follows:

Once upon a time after World War II ended, dogs fled to Switzerland from all over Europe. The dog from England says he left the country because it was too class-conscious. The dog from France meanwhile says he couldn’t live in a country where cronyism was the order of the day. The dog from Germany has a more simple reason: he didn’t have enough to eat after his country lost the war.

Last comes the dog from Russia, who says, “I’m here because I want to howl freely.”

“I’m like that Russian dog,” he said, drawing howls of laughter from his audience.

He also compared himself with the child in the Emperor’s New Clothes fable. “Like that boy, I want to say what I see,” he said.

A scion of the former Banyen princely house, his first political cartoon was a satirical one on the late Senior General Saw Maung who took power after a bloody coup in 1988 saying “I saved Burma”.

His drawing shows Saw Maung dragging Burma off the water with a rope around its neck. “Burma indeed was saved,” he said “But it wasn’t alive anymore. That was my message.”

In 1995, he joined the mutiny against Mong Tai Army leader Khun Sa, made peace with Rangoon and went to dig for gold. Unsuccessful in this enterprise, he finally accepted an invitation from SHAN and arrived in Chiangmai in January 2003. Within a few months, he became a legend.

Today, he is one of the few cartoonists who are in big demand for their comic sketches. “It was unlike when I was back in Burma,” he recalled. “There, 8 of every 10 drawings were rejected for their political unacceptability.”

Cartoons, nevertheless, he maintains, are safer and more effective than a lot of words, written or typed. “Before the 2010 elections, activists were in Burma distributing pamphlets urging them to boycott the polls,” he said. “Most people refused to accept them when handed out to them, or read them when the pamphlets, were pasted on the walls or lampposts, because they were afraid of being caught. However, when my cartoons were distributed or pasted, no one was afraid to read them even when the officials were watching.”

(Some critics have of course countered that the success of the boycott was such, the unused ballot papers unintentionally became votes for the junta’s proxy, Union Solidarity and Development Party.)

To young people, who aspire to become cartoonists like him, his advice is that a cartoon is more than a work of techniques. “The techniques are the same,” he said. “But you must have your whole body and mind behind what you are drawing so it becomes a work of art, what I call 3H: Heart (A-tway) Head (Nyan) and Hand (A-yay).”