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"In his native town," Author U Nu wrote of himself in the third person, "the nickname of Tate Sanetha, Saturday-born street Arab, was well known to everybody . . .* By the age of twelve he was a heavy drinker. Often as a sequel to his drinking bouts, his stupefied little body might be seen carried home on someone's shoulder. His father, deeply ashamed and hopeless of reclaiming him, could only banish him to live as he would in a paddy godown outside the town. The boy brewed his own liquor there."
This way of life continued until "something 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."
At the 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.
How to Win 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 man. U Nu became Thakin Nu. One of his schoolmates and fellow rebels was Thakin Than Tun, who now commands the Communist army in Burma; another Thakin runs the rival Trotskyite or Red Flag Communist army. U Nu drank deeply of Marx, but he mixed his drinks. During these turbulent 19305, he translated into Burmese another book that had influenced him: Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People.
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.