Meeting greatness

Over these past many years, I have been privileged to meet, get to know and write about some of the great men and women of Asia (or GMWA as we have come to call them).

“Great Men and Women of Asia” is also the title of five volumes of easy-reading books (there’s more to come) that contain stories about the lives of Asia’s greats, both the known and the little-known, the times and milieu they live/d in and their contributions to enrich this part of the world through their selfless deeds, courage and creativity. Plus, plus.

Greatness of spirit or the G-factor is the plus that makes them a breed apart. It is a gift, a grace. The reason the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation (RMAF) picked these persons (and institutions, too) to be emulated.

The great news is that the GMWA series recently won the “Excellence Award for Best Writing in book form about Asia” at the 2008 Asian Publishing Awards held in Singapore. The GMWA books bested 79 entries from 23 countries. Congratulations to the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation (RMAF) and staff, Anvil Publishing, the books’ editors and the bunch of us writers who had consented to be harassed. We did great in our own little way. Greatness has certainly rubbed off on us.



But long before these books on the RMAF awardees (now numbering 271 since 1958) were conceived, I’ve had the chance to meet and write about a good number of them year after year after year on RM week in August and on other occasions. The pieces came out in the Sunday Inquirer Magazine, the Inquirer front page and in my column.

There were several greats I wrote about in the GMWA books but did not meet face to face (some had gone on to their eternal reward) but writing about them was like meeting them in person.

Established in 1958, the RM Award is widely regarded as the region’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize. It celebrates the memory and leadership example of the third Philippine President of the republic, and is given every year to individuals or organizations in Asia who have done the same selfless service exhibited in the life of the late and beloved Filipino leader. RM died in a plane crash in 1957.

Three RM awardees have gone on to win the Nobel Prize—the Dalai Lama of Tibet, Mother Teresa of India and Muhammad Yunus of Bangladesh.

The Magsaysay Award is currently given in six categories: Government Service, Public Service, Community Leadership, Journalism, Literature, and Creative Communication Arts, Peace and International Understanding, and Emergent Leadership.

The awards are given on Aug. 31, the birthday of the late Pres. Magsaysay.

I went through the list of awardees of the past years and I discovered I have written articles on 28 of them, among them, Thai Princess Sirindhorn, a doctor-nun working among lepers in Pakistan, a Chinese-Vietnamese priest-soldier who led refugees to freedom, a Filipino development worker, an Indian journalist, a Chinese doctor, a Sri Lankan musician. Some of them I had written about even before or long after they became awardees, others as newly elected awardees and some posthumously for the GMWA books.

Some of the RM awardees are my friends, like Ben Abadiano, Sheila Coronel, Inquirer founding chair Eugenia Apostol. The late movie director Lino Brocka was a comrade in the parliament of the streets.

Today I am interviewing three of the seven 2008 awardees. And on Monday I will watch the world-famous Cloud Gate Dance Theater from Taiwan founded by 1999 RM Awardee Lin Hwai Min.

Journalists are seldom awed, but I can say that every time I write about RM awardees I am awed and inspired by their stories. Some even bring tears to my eyes as I write. And, to borrow the title of a great Filipino’s autobiography, I am wont to exclaim, “I walked with heroes.” And saints, too.

From among those I have written about in GMWA, I can easily pick three as my favorites. All their stories could become thought-provoking movies.

Vinoba Bhave (1958, Community Leadership) belonged to the very first batch of awardees. An Indian mystic and patriot, Bhave continued where Mahatma Ghandi left off. Fr. Augustine Hoa’s (1964, Public Service) life story and cross-country work among refugees on the run unfold like a suspense novel. A China-born Vietnamese, Hoa braved the jungle and wielded a gun to defend his people. I wish I could track him down. Bhave has long been dead. I didn’t get to meet these two great men face to face.

Dr. Ruth Pfau (2002, Public Service), a German nun and doctor, chose to stay on in Pakistan to minister to the lepers. I interviewed her when she came for the award. The 70-ish Catholic nun looked beautiful in her Pakistani attire.

This year, the 50th year of the RMAF, is a special year. RMAF is holding a two-day international conference with the theme “Changing Asia: Forging Partnerships, Building Sustainability” at the Philippine International Convention Center. Among the participants are past and present awardees and kindred spirits from different sectors of society.

Asia is indeed changing rapidly. There has been phenomenal growth in some parts which means more opportunities for more people. But this phenomenon has also given rise to problems even as old inequities persist. The environment bears the brunt of rapid development.

But it’s not all bad news. Over the past 50 years, Asia has produced many inspiring leaders, among them 271 men and women who have been recognized and honored with the RM Award. They have used their leadership to effect change in their communities and inspire the younger generation.

Among the key issues these Asian laureates and participants from different sectors (business, civil society, media, academe, development assistance organizations, etc.) will confront are poverty and inequality, environmental degradation and social conflict.

There is hope. It’s raining greatness in August.

Kasilag: ‘Making a difference in music’

MANILA, Philippines—I was in Davao City last week for the soft opening of the Heritage Museum of the Pamulaan Center of Indigenous People’s Education and to attend the opening of the 2nd National Conference of Indigenous Peoples Higher Education in the Philippines. (I will write a feature story about the events in another section.)

While the members of the University of Southeastern Philippines’ Pangkat Silayan Theater Collective, gloriously clad in their ethnic attire, were playing genuine ethnic sounds, I thought of National Artist for Music (1989) Lucrecia Kasilag. She had worked hard to put ethnic music in the mainstream through her compositions, until the sounds became familiar and ensconced in the Philippine musical landscape.

I went back to Manila with the sound of the kulintang, sauroy, dabakan and ahongan still reverberating in my soul. The next day, I learned about the passing of one of the country’s musical icons. Kasilag, fondly called Tita King by many, passed away last Aug. 16. She would have been 90 on Aug. 31.

Kasilag reaped many awards and honors but an award from one’s school is always special. Kasilag received the Pax Award (1980) from St. Scholastica’s College where she finished a degree in music education (1939). The award was for having “consistently exhibited outstanding cultural leadership especially in…music and the performing arts … acknowledged … in the national (and) international world of musicians and artists.”

Part of the PAX write-up on her read: “Once asked what she would like to be remembered for, the grand dame of the arts said: ‘That I made a difference in music.’ And she has. Her passion for indigenous musical forms and instruments and integrating them with Western idioms has infused her six-decade career as composer (she has more than 300 pieces to her name), conductor, educator, researcher, administrator and cultural entrepreneur.”

I mention her Scholastican background because she wrote a short piece for the beautiful book “Daughters True: 100 Years of Scholastican Education” (which won a 2007 National Book Award). This was about her student days at St. Scho.

Her piece “Practice, practice, practice” was one of the small sidebars in the chapter on the college of music. It has a photo of Kasilag with her piano teacher on a flower-decked stage on her graduation recital day in 1939. One can’t miss the giant G-clef made of flowers which was standard in those days.

Here is Kasilag’s piece.

“When I was a college senior at Philippine Women’s University, I decided to cross-enroll at Sister Baptista Battig’s Conservatory of Music at St. Scholastica’s College, a few blocks away from PWU. Every Thursday, the trusty Buick would take me there where I worked for a Music Teacher’s Diploma. Josephine Cojuangco (Reyes), (President) Cory Aquino’s elder sister, was my first piano student there, as we were required to handle grade school piano lessons during their recess. She was to become president of Far Eastern University. Angelina Barredo and her sisters were also my students during this period.

“‘Practice, practice, practice’ was my answer to the query, ‘Which way to Carnegie Hall, please?’ That is what I devoted my time to at home.

“Papa had been appointed Commonwealth Commissioner for Mindanao and Sulu. Nevertheless, he always made it to my piano recitals, proud of my junior recital of which Alejo Valdez of the Spanish daily ‘La Vanguardia’ had this to say:

“‘In the musical firmament a new star of great magnitude has appeared. Miss Lucrecia Kasilag. Her recital was a great event … (she) surprised the audience with her sense of exactitude, time and value to the written notes of the musical piece. This is done without much apparent effort but with natural grace…’

“With great glee, I received another ‘stick’—a flat 1—in Apologetics (theology) from Sr. Withburga Kilger. Since I had no real grounding in catechism before then, it was good to know that the extra work I put into Sr. Withburga’s class was worth the effort.

“In PWU, I was on the baseball and volleyball teams, though this was short-lived. After suffering so many sprained fingers from catching and tossing balls to the great dismay of Doña Pura Villanueva, my piano teacher, she demanded to know, ‘Do you want to be a baseball player or a pianist?’ She forbade me forever from baseball and volleyball if I were to give my scheduled junior recital.

“For my graduation recital, Doña Pura wielded the baton herself for my piece de resistance, the seldom played work by Ignaz Paderewski, Concerto in A minor for piano and orchestra, with Professor Ernesto Vallejo as concert master. The composer was Poland’s president as well, a distinguished statesman.”

Kasilag was at the helm of the Cultural Center of the Philippines for many years. She was music director of the Bayanihan Philippine Dance Company and was responsible for its emergence as one of the country’s premier cultural groups. She was chairperson of the League of Filipino Composers for over 30 years. She was director of the Center for Arts and Humanities of PWU and dean of the Philippine College of Music and Arts. She had haired the Asian Composers’ League for over 20 years and was honorary adviser to the Asian Arts Festival and honorary member of the Unesco International Music Council.

Although born in La Union, Kasilag had a Mindanao-Sulu connection. She had a huge collection of Asian ethnic musical instruments.

While parts of Mindanao burn and the sound of guns reverberates in the darkness, I imagine the ethnic Mindanao sounds that Kasilag had worked to preserve and to make known to the rest of the country and the world.

Final tribute for National Artist Lucrecia Kasilag will be at 9 a.m. this Thursday in the Main Theatre of the Cultural Center of the Philippines.

The boy who ate MSG

In literature you have the boy who ate stars (two different works and authors from different continents but the same title) and in tabloid journalism the boy who had a fish for a twin. In the recent news we had the boy who ate MSG.

More than a week ago there was a news story from Sagay City, Negros Occidental about a two-year-old boy who had MSG (monosodium glutamate, a flavor enhancer commonly known as vetsin) to go with his rice. He must have had too much of MSG (as there was no dish to eat with his rice) and he got dizzy, fell down the stairs and hit his head on the ground. His destination was the hospital where doctors found him to have suffered from head trauma as a result of the fall.

According the news report by Carla P. Gomez (Inquirer Visayas) and from TV news online the boy was out of danger but there was bleeding in an area of the brain that needed attention.



As the story went, the children’s father and mother (who is pregnant with their sixth child) left their two-year-old son in the care of his four siblings because they were going to sell buko ice candy. The couple, both in their 30s, earn about P60 a day. The children, according to the mother, usually ate rice with salt because that was all they could afford. When the salt ran out, the nine-year-old daughter fed her baby brother with rice mixed with MSG and water. In Ilonggo, ginsamo-samo.

For the poor, salt or asin could serve as ulam when there is nothing to go with the rice. (Although Tagalog speakers would say magdildil ng asin, not mag-ulam ng asin.) We need our salt like we need our staple pan de sal (bread of salt).

Filipinos translate the word ulam into English as viand. English speakers who are not Filipinos aren’t familiar with the word viand or, if they know the word, don’t use it. In the dictionary viand simply means “an item of food” or “a choice or tasty dish.”

Viand for us Filipinos is ulam that goes with the rice. I don’t know how the word viand got into our food vocabulary. The word dish might be associated with washing dishes. In Ilonggo (Hiligaynon) and Cebuano, viand is sud-an. In Bicol it is sira. In Ilocano it is sidain. When the viand is delicious we say in different tongues: Masarap ang ulam. Kanamit gid sang sud-an. Lami gyud ang sud-an. Masiramon su sira. Naimas ti sidain.

When there is no viand, eating only rice should be much safer than mixing into it too much salt, bagoong, soy sauce, patis or fish sauce, sugar or MSG. Pity the kidneys and the blood. But unlike bread that could be eaten as is, rice, for Filipinos, has to be flavored with something. But then, even bread has to have palaman (filling) or dapli (that’s Ilonggo for “to eat with”). And Filipino-style pasta has to be groaning with sauce (even as we say—argggh!—“sous”).

And when it is the other way around, like in Chinese banquets when it’s one ulam after another and the fried rice is to come only at the end, Filipinos are aghast. Where’s the rice? Ulam and rice must go together. Rice must be eaten with something. Even if, for the poor boy from Negros, it’s MSG.

I think MSG manufacturers should have a warning on MSG wrappers like plastic bags have. I’ve had my own “MSG syndrome” experience many years ago when, after a sumptuous meal in an Asian restaurant, I felt a tightening in my neck and was short of breath for about 30 minutes. I didn’t know about the MSG syndrome then and I thought I was just too full and I let the feeling pass without alerting anyone.

But MSG or no MSG, what was a two-year-old boy or baby doing on the stairs that he had to fall? Well, the five kids were simply by themselves with no adult to look after them. The parents had to leave home to scrounge for their next meal.

This reminds me of the fairy tale “Hansel and Gretel” popularized by the Brothers Grimm which, I think, should be read “with parental guidance”. Brother and sister were abandoned in the woods by their parents who were too poor to feed them. Lost in the wilderness, they chanced upon a cottage full of goodies where a witch lived.

That old tale arose from the famine of the 1300s in Europe when families had to dig for roots in the wild just so they could eat.

This reminds me of the news story, some years ago, about families in some remote place in the south who dug for wild edible roots so they could eat. Some fell ill because they did not know how to process and cook the starchy roots that were considered poisonous. Toxicologists, chemists and food technologists were called in to assess the root. I don’t know about the root cause.

I remember writing a column on the physiology of hunger after that. Maybe I should dig up that root, er, piece.

The story about the boy who ate MSG speaks not only about the poverty many families have to endure but also about parental neglect and ignorance. A family of seven (going on eight) subsisting on P60 a day, eating rice with salt and—why not—MSG… …Who to blame?

And now, even the cheapest ulam which is canned sardines is becoming expensive for the poor. Worse, canneries in the Zamboanga are either downsizing or stopping operations because of the prohibitive cost of production. Fishing vessels are grounded. Workers are laid off and weeping. Their employers are weeping.

If things don’t change, about 50,000 land- and sea-based workers in the Zamboanga fishing and canning industry who have lost their jobs will no longer be able to afford sardines. Their last pay could only go so far. Like the boy who ate MSG, they’d go dizzy and fall to the ground. Or they could go to the wilderness and dig for roots.

'Boses': Music to heal

"MUSIC is a holy place, a cathedral so majestic that we can sense the magnificence of the universe, and also a hovel so simple and private that none of us can plumb its deepest secrets... It is the sounds of earth and sky, of tides and storms... From the first cry of life to that last sigh of death, from the beating of our hearts to the soaring of our imaginations, we are enveloped by sound and vibration every moment of our lives. It is the primal breath of creation itself, the speech of angels and atoms, the stuff of which life and dreams, souls and stars, are ultimately fashioned."

That quote is from the Overture (introduction) by Don Campbell, the author of the amazing book, "The Mozart Effect: Tapping the Power of Music to Heal the Body, Strengthen the Mind, and Unlock the Creative Spirit."

This fave book of mine was on my mind while I was watching the film "Boses," directed by Ellen Ongkeko-Marfil, last Monday at the University of the Philippines' Film Center. After showing at the Cultural Center of the Philippines, the Cinemalaya 2008 films are now in UP. I thought if there was only one film I could watch, this better be it. I wanted to see the "Mozart effect" happen.

"Boses" didn't get the plum prize but it was on the short list and got very good reviews and comments. Here's my own.

The paths of two broken people--one a reclusive musician named Ariel who had known great love and played great violin music; and the other, a small, battered boy named Onyok who doesn't speak--meet. The setting is a shelter for abused children run by the violinist's sister in their own home ground in a rustic setting. Ariel's own refuge is a cottage inside the compound.

Noted violinist Coke Bolipata plays the role of what the children call baliw or mad musician (because of his erratic temper), while eight-year-old Julian Duque, a talented violinist, plays Onyok. Cherrie Pie Picache runs the shelter, while Ricky Davao is the abusive father who uses his son as an ash tray and punching bag. And yes, there is Shirley, Onyok's older and protective playmate. And where's Onyok's mother? Guess where.

The flashbacks give context. Onyok being battered verbally, emotionally and physically by his father. Ariel during happy times with his music protégé and girlfriend, Juilliard-bound Bianca (Meryll Soriano) whom he later loses in a dark, tragic way.

Onyok's refuge and hiding place is the closet. He can hear but does not speak. Battering silenced him. He lost his voice to violence. It is through the violin that his heart would find a voice.

It is Onyok's silence that speaks the unspoken. It is his eyes that mirror the terror. In the case of Ariel, the violin is his medium to express the dissonance and sadness in his soul, until... (Ariel playing Massenet's "Meditation from Thais" sets the tone.)

How music welded these two broken souls and set them off on the road to healing is explored in this moving film. It is obvious that scriptwriter Rody Vera had delved into the nuances of rehabilitation not just of the battered but of the batterer as well, and, just as important, the commitment of those who work to end violence inflicted on the young.

The plot is not complicated but the problems of the characters are complex. Music may not be the panacea for all their pains but it helps that music, through singing, is very much part of their healing program. Onyok, who does not sing, is a special case. He accidentally finds a hiding place in the violinist's own hideaway. The initial encounter is tense but both soon discover the music in each other, and also the pain.

It matters a lot that the two lead but neophyte actors are musicians. In real life, Coke is a noted concert violinist and Julian is a budding musical talent under Coke's tutelage. So it is quite credible that, in the movie, the boy would be playing difficult pieces after one year. Onyok happens to be a prodigy in the making and his discoverer knows this. Ariel tutors him on Bartok, Mozart, Haydn.

There are other subplots in the shelter that make the movie engrossing, and there are issues with the boy's batterer who himself undergoes rehab. Veteran actor Ricky Davao as Onyok's contrite father Marcelo almost steals the show toward the end.

(The big Ibong Adarna Theater was packed and the audience reacted warmly, tearfully, and during one suspenseful moment, loudly, as if they were watching a Pacquiao fight.)

Then a cathartic moment happens, not in the music room, but on a beach where there is only the sound of the waves folding and unfolding.

A year passes. On a makeshift stage under the mango trees, with only a cellist and pianist assisting, teacher and pupil play together in a violin recital. The lush surroundings reverberate with a happy Vivaldi opus. It didn't have to be Mozart.

On another note, why the "Mozart Effect"? Research has shown that Mozart's music, more than any other, "invariably calmed listeners, improved spatial perception, and allowed them to express themselves more clearly--communicating with both heart and mind... Clearly, the rhythms, melodies, and high frequencies of Mozart's music stimulate and charge the creative and motivational regions of the brain." This is proven by compelling accounts. Campbell's book is about Mozart and beyond--how music heals and why.

Whether it is Lucio San Pedro's melody for Levi Celerio's "Sa Ugoy ng Duyan" or Beethoven's "Ninth" or the Trappists chanting Gregorian, music soaks the soul with its power.

Music Therapy for the Soul with Jesuit Fr. Manoling Francisco (whose compositions are liturgical staples) on Oct. 10 at the Ateneo. Call Cefam, Tel. No. 4264289 to 92.