It’s good to see the Irrawaddy rerun a November 2012 interview with Amitav Ghosh, author of the internationally acclaimed novel The Glass Palace. There’s more to chew on here than in a dozen standard news items. Mostly, you find yourself endorsing what Ghosh has to say. On one matter, though, I’m not so sure.

Near the start of the interview, Ghosh is asked this question: “The last time you were in Burma was 1997. What differences have you noticed after 15 years?” This is the first part of his reply: “It is like going from one planet to another. It’s so different. It’s almost unbelievable, and I was told in fact that most of these changes actually occurred in the last 12 months, which is truly staggering because the visual landscape has changed so much.”

Without doubt that’s the case in Yangon. Elsewhere, though, it’s striking how little things have changed. Recently Lin San Letpanpya posted on Facebook some lovely photos of Burma in 1971 – people shopping at markets, families visiting pagodas, that sort of thing. In them, there’s almost nothing to set 1971 apart from 2011. Maybe the longyi were a little more psychedelic then – the sixties having a small impact on Burma in the early seventies. Beyond that, the faces, the markets, the evident poverty all look much the same across 40 years.

Today, certainly, someone even in a Myanmar market or pagoda would be holding a mobile phone. Now maybe things finally are changing everywhere. For most people for most of the past half-century, however, that has not been the case. In the words of The Rocky Horror Show, the cult musical from 1973, Burma for decades was stuck in a time warp.