THE CONSTANT DISCOMFORT OF BEING PRESENT

Slumped back on the thinning mattress of the smoky, cell-like sleeper cabin, I drift off momentarily - only to be thrown about like the forgotten foetus of a wayward pregnancy as he night train lurches north. Clutch, I do, to my umbilical cord - a one-dollar SIM card and its brightly bundled data plan.

The constant wave of 4G and on-board USB power in a country bereft of basic infrastructure confirms my hunch that perhaps there's a drug more ubiquitous than heroin here on tap as the new state-sanctioned opiate for the third-world masses.

As we trundle past fields of anamorphic Constablian bucolic splendour — the oxen, the plough, the haystack - folks in first, second and third class echo-chambers suck on the new corporate teat, wrapping themselves in uterine comfort, soothing themselves with hit after hit of dopamine ‘likes'.

We screech to a stop as indolent slum junkies scratch their way around the shadows of the train, and we, the privileged, are served Juvenal's bread and circus as one. An impromptu pageant is upon us: a sideshow of hawkers stream aboard the bare carriage, flogging packets and packets of crunchy counterfeit Chinese corn syrup snacks.

A replication of the psychophysical and the neurochemical torment of trauma and paranoia all too familiar to those living in this oppressive and abusive regime, the disease of addiction similarly, too, dictates your every move. And whether you're into heroin, social media or sugar, this uncannily familiar systematic violation of a fundamental freedom - of choice curtailed - is unerringly exacted upon you.

Extinguish this and one discovers beneath a horror greater still, an interminable curse: the constant discomfort of being present.

// Documentary shoot in Yangon, Myanmar.