Mizzima’s moment came during the monks’ protest of 2007 and the subsequent repression by the junta. The number of visits went up to 3 lakh till the junta blocked Internet access to all websites like Mizzima, including to the Irrawady News Magazine. “Even then, we managed to upload stories from inside the country,” says Myint. Initially, Mizzima’s target audience was the global community interested in what was happening in Myanmar. “Today, 40 per cent of our audience is inside Myanmar,” says Myint. Of the country’s 55 million people, only one per cent has access to Internet. “But that small section uses the Internet effectively. Even though our website is banned in the country, our readers know how to access it through proxy servers.”

The Mizzima team in Delhi is a close-knit one, with one Indian, Mukey, the cartoonist. Most haven’t been home for years now. Mungpi, 31, who comes from the Chin state, says, “My mother died last year. I don’t know how my father and brother are doing.” The Myanmar community in Delhi is a tiny one-barely touching 3,000-and the journalists often find themselves lost in an alien land. “Mizzima journalists are paid very little and living standards are not high. As refugees in India, they often have difficulty renting houses. It’s an uncertain life and full of daily trials. In the midst of all this, to work as professional journalists becomes difficult sometimes,” says Myint.

In the newsroom, work continues between power cuts and conversations over the American who swam to Suu Kyi’s house on University Avenue in Rangoon’s Bahan township. The germ of another story idea, one that is uploaded on to the website in the evening: Do you know John Yettaw?