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| Diary |
Magazine | 04 May 2009 |
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| Manila Diary by Prabhu Ghate |
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A guitar band greets you as you get off the plane, banners urge balikbayans (returnees) to "bring home a friend" and the lady at immigration has the time to chat ("well, we’ve got a new president since you were last here"). Welcome to the Philippines, one of the most laid-back, friendly, unbureaucratic countries in the world. It never seems to be able to catch up with its Southeast Asian neighbours; Manila’s grime and antediluvian jeepneys and army of under-employeds persist, but so does the charm. The bandana-wearing vendor at the traffic light lets you off the hook when you don’t want to buy any chewing gum (or cigarettes, or goggles, or a girlie magazine, he’s got everything strapped around him). He just smiles and says, "okay, next time".
My driver asks me whether I’m here for ‘five-six’, a natural question, because so many "Bumbais" are. Bumbai is the word for Indians (the early arrivals came from Bombay) and ‘five-six’ is the traditional system of itinerant moneylending, in which six pesos is repayable on a loan of five. Sounds like an astronomical rate of interest, especially if the loan is just for a day, but ‘five-six’ is incredibly hard and risky work for the lender. I went around once with Jaswinder Singh (the profession is now the monopoly of the Sikhs), who was just Josip to his clients, most of them market vendors. He had to stop by at dozens of stalls to collect the small sums owed in daily repayments on 100-day loans. The women all wanted to chat and joke with him ("Hey Josip, who is your friend, is he married?"), but Josip was in a hurry, he had other markets to visit.
It was a common sight not so many years ago to see Sikh moneylenders doing their rounds on motorcycles with bags of cash to distribute or collect. Recent arrivals, yet to master Tagalog, they still managed to collect and disburse unsecured loans with absolutely no recourse if someone refused to pay. Clearly, they were perceived to be providing a valuable service. The next generation moved on to bigger and better things, like Ramon Bagatsing, the mayor of Manila when Marcos was president. Josip’s son was doing an MBA in Australia and his daughter was in a finishing school in Switzerland.
Rants and Raves
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Filipino good humour, calm and style were crucial in bringing an end to the Marcos dictatorship without a drop of blood being spilt in the famous People Power revolution of February 1986. It started with a botched coup attempt on the presidential palace. Marcos, ever the showman, was on TV that night with the failed coup leaders, in what looked like a chat show. But the next day the crowds started pouring out on to the streets in a sea of yellow, chanting "Cory, Cory, Cory" (Cory Aquino had just been cheated out of the elections), singing and praying as they massed around a couple of disaffected army camps in the centre of town, to protect them from the tanks Marcos had called up. Jets flew overhead and the standoff continued for two whole days, with nuns lying down in front of the tanks and children offering the soldiers chocolates. The soldiers had to ask us to step back to let their helicopters land. It was half-carnival, half deadly menace. The only independent source of news was Radio Veritas (Radio Truth) which kept moving its transmitter to evade detection, as it carried messages in support of Cory from the head of the Church, the infelicitously named Cardinal Sin.
On day four Marcos decided to show that he too had "people power", and threw the palace open to his supporters. I managed to get in and climb the stairs to the state banquet hall, to arrive on a surreal scene of litter-strewn chaos as thousands of Marcos goons ate lunch out of styrofoam boxes. They were perched everywhere, even on the grand piano. Little did they know that the first family, which had excused itself for the afternoon, was busy packing its bags. It was flown out of the palace that evening into exile, just as the crowds poured over the walls to discover Imelda’s 3,000 shoes.
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With 7,000 islands in the Philippines, you don’t have to be a millionaire to own one, it is more like owning a farm in Chhatarpur. A friend invited me to visit his, and the sea spray and salt air were intoxicating on the boat ride as we watched his little island grow from a speck on the horizon into a hillock covered with trees, like a flower pot growing out of the sea. The spit of sandy beach we landed on disappeared at high tide. From the bamboo cottage on top you could gaze down onto the aquamarine sea floor and watch the turtles grazing. The stunning seascape went through every shade of blue as night descended.
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Like everyone else, the newspapers have a lot of fun. A banner headline while I was there said: Cha Cha sails through Con Ass. It referred apparently to a charter change bill in the constitutional assembly.
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