The way they were - BY THE WAY by Max V. Soliven

On my way home from Delhi, India, the other week, I stopped over in Singapore for a day. This gave me an opportunity to contrast two cities (the latter a city-state). No two places could be more different, just – in fact – as night is in contrast to day.

Delhi, the site of seven ancient cities dating back millenniums, was dusty, blackened by pollution and soot, riotous with undisciplined traffic (cycle-rickshaws, auto-rickshaws, scooters, motorbikes, cars, buses and trucks careening madly into each other’s paths, each driver as feverish as Lord Shiva precariously dancing the dance of destruction), raucous with noise, bustling with population, festering with garbage and the detritus of the ages, cows strolling in majestic and maddening slowness in the way of racing vehicles, provoking a screeching of tortured brakes and the burning of clutches. It was bedlam. It was also exotic and strangely exciting.

Singapore, for its part, was squeaky clean. Its wide and well-ordered boulevards, including its central Orchard artery, bursting with trees, flowering shrubs, indeed choking in chlorophyll. The traffic, like its painfully legally-abiding denizens, was sedate and well-mannered. Prosperity was oozing out of every pore, determination and purpose projected by every step, the towering skyscrapers – all chrome, glass and granite – were monuments to progress. The toilets were shining with ceramic and virtue. Even "sin", which exists even in Singapore, was kept discreetly out of sight (and Singaporeans had to zip off across the causeway to J.B. – Johor Baru in Malaysia – to let off steam for their occasional displays of rudeness and sybaritic revelry).

In India, you felt the imprint of huddled and curry-flavored, sweaty humanity, inhaled the fascinating fragrance of cow dung, incense and the sacred dust of the centuries, while your spirit gamboled along with the 3.3 million gods, goddesses, and deities that inhabit the Hindu pantheon, in various permutations, incarnations, and forms.

In Singapore, you scented only flowers and deodorants, while your eyes revelled at the sight of man-made wonders. Delhi was fetid. Singapore is a garden city, part of it reclaimed from the sea, and every tree and bush, it’s said, personally planted by Lee Kuan Yew.

* * *

On the shelves of the "Borders" bookshop, which glistens on Orchard Road, I spotted the latest of former Prime Minister Lee’s kilometric volumes of memoirs. It was aptly entitled, From Third World to First World, and contained the final chapters of the saga of Singapore as narrated by The Creator, L.K.Y. himself. For it is Mr. Lee’s enduring achievement (soon to be inherited by Brigadier General Lee, his son, scheduled to be anointed Prime Minister some years from now, and dubbed "Baby God") that he invented that upmarket country named "Singapore" and manufactured a nation composed mostly of Chinese, with a few Malays and Indians thrown in to spice up the scene.

This is no mean feat. When this writer first went to Singapore in 1960 as a young and brash reporter (now I am old and brash), the idea of that half-barren, decrepit colonial backwater becoming a potent city-state was a laugh. It was full of smelly canals and cracked two or three-story shophouses, inhabited by former coolies and plantation workers, rickshaw men, weathered Chinese men and women, their crude coffins beside them, waiting in front of Death Houses to die, so their bodies, hopefully, could be shipped "home" to China for burial.

The only swanky place was Robinson’s department store in Raffles’ Place, next to which was Change Alley, a small hole-in-the-wall, where you could convert your foreign currency or valuta into local Sing dollahs (that’s how they pronounced those bills). There wasn’t a decent restaurant in town, except one Cantonese joint called Hillman (yes, like the car) on Escarpment Road which was open-fronted and less sophisticated than Ma Mon Luk in Quiapo.

The Singapore River, crammed with rickety sampans, was so (ugh) disgustingly black, smelly and malodorous that, as we foreign correspondents jogged beside it, we coined a name for the city, "Stink-a-pooh."

Look at Singapore today. Where the Death Houses once stood is Shenton Way, the high-polish financial and banking center, a virtual New York Wall Street-cum-Threadneedle street of inner London. Deluxe hotels try to elbow each other for predominance, an efficient subway system zooms you along your way, buses traverse the city with a syncopated hiss, cars – which when purchased cost a fortune and require a special "certificate" for even the right of purchase – have to buy special access to the downtown area (computerized for convenience) and gleam with modernity. The second- and third-generation "Singaporean" is light years away from his rickshaw-puller and street-sweeper ancestors. You feel safe, well-cossetted in today’s Singapore – and, after a while, quite bored. However, it’s a comfortable sort of boredom, a feeling of temporary relief, really, on the part of someone whose career is lived, constantly, on the edge. On the edge of danger, on the edge of adventure, on the edge of stupidity, and even madness, that is.

Would I live in Singapore? Perhaps not. Yet it’s paradise for many, a refuge, an oasis of calm and civility in an Asia teeming with hostilities and frustration.

* * *

When my friend Archie, a Filipino who made his millions in machines and other businesses and lives in Singapore in rare manorial splendor, took us to Changi International Airport to send my wife and I off to Manila, he took us "upstairs" to a little eatery which few foreigners perhaps see because it is outside the Customs zone, and exists to feed, I guess, the local citizens who go to Changi to see friends and relatives off or else meet incoming businessmen and guests.

The place was named CHANGI KOPI TIAM, and as soon as I entered this little eatery, I felt the pang of nostalgia. For here, quietly enshrined, was the Singapore I remembered with fondness from my first tour of duty here (when we, in "modern" Manila, especially Makati which was at the time for many Asians "The Town of the Future", could still look down on "backward" Singapore), this charming, almost rustic Singapore.

As you might know, Kopi is how they used to spell "coffee" in Singapore. In that charming coffee shop, the simple Singapore of yesteryear was lovingly recreated, with its primitive furniture and its modest collection of jars containing coffee and various teas – a Hawker’s stall, in short. What was particularly striking were the sepia-stained old photographs arranged in a montage on its walls. In one is pictured a Hawker "vendor", circa 1918, a weary-looking Chinese with despair in his eyes, dull of face, and the patience of the poor in the droop of his shoulders. In the background, equally fatigued Chinese workers queue up for a drink of ice-water, dispensed by another vendor, dated 1950. On another wall is a portrait of an itinerant "Cinema-on-Wheels", where you could watch a movie from a peephole, dating back to 1951. In another scene, a propeller-driven airplane takes off from Kallang airport, a far-cry from the streamlined Changi with its two shining terminals, and a third a-building. Another shot depicts the vanished "World Amusement Park", a rudimentary place of entertainment. Et cetera.

What brings home the KOPI TIAM designers’ point is the fact that such "primitive" scenes are just a generation away. That wall display, more eloquently than Lee Kuan Yew’s autobiography, drives home the miracle he, with his iron will and unrelenting purpose (assisted by an Internal Security Ordinance that brooks no defiance), has wrought. That Hawker (vendor), with hopelessness on his face in 1918, no doubt sired sons and daughters now "respectable" and well-padded in prosperity, and grandchildren well on their way to success in their own right. In this city-state of worker-bees, everybody gets a "number" assigned to him or her at birth. That serial number – which is imprinted thenceforth on birth certificates, licenses, permits, I.D. cards, passports, inland revenue documents, and other official papers from cradle to grave assures every "Singaporean" a slice of the good life.

Can we accomplish the same thing in the Philippines? Not the way our "democracy" is. Time will tell whether L.K.Y., the man who almost single-handedly pulled it off, and his Singaporeans have chosen the better part. G.K. Chesterton once called the Irish "the race whom God made mad: for all their wars are merry, and all their songs are sad." We must be the Irishmen of Asia. Alas, thus far, we haven’t enjoyed the Luck of the Irish.

But who knows? Either we’ll get ourselves our own homegrown Lee Kuan Yew someday – or else, wise up.

* * *

President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, as we’ve pointed out, has been recruiting her Cabinet members and other appointees from three sectors – namely, Congress, the "re-threads" from the Aquino and Ramos administrations (including military re-hires), and from non-governmental organizations or NGOs like KOMPIL and the so-called "civil society", whatever that means.

There are, of course, some very well- qualified and serendipitous appointees, like Finance Secretary Bert Romulo, Justice Secretary Nani Perez, Vice President and Foreign Affairs Secretary Tito Guingona, Budget Secretary Emy Boncodin and Commission on Audit Chairman, the "returnee" Guillermo Carague. The rest will still have to prove themselves in their brand-new posts.

In the case of DOTC Secretary Pantaleon "Bebot" Alvarez, who shows promise, he will have to strive mightily to improve the sluggish "work ethic" of his subordinates in the spoiled Department of Transportation and Communications, brushing the conceited "technoquacks" aside in the process.

One appointment of GMA which stands out is that of Court Administrator Alfredo L. Benipayo as the new Chairman of the Commission on Elections. Benipayo’s role is both crucial and urgent. The Comelec is the constitutional body that, as the organic law states, "enforces and administers all laws and regulations relative to the conduct of an election, plebiscite, initiative, referendum and recall" and also "exercises original jurisdiction over all contests relating to the elections, returns and qualifications of all elective regional, provincial, and city officials, and appellate jurisdiction over all contests involving elective municipal officials decided by trial courts of general jurisdiction, or involving elective barangay officials decided by trial courts of limited jurisdiction." (Whew! Those framers of our 1987 Constitution were verbose, indeed.)

Justice Benipayo is a career jurist. He has been Court Administrator, meaning the body that supervises all lower courts and their personnel, for the past four years. He joined the judiciary as Court of First Instance judge in Bulacan in 1974, and was moved to Manila in 1976, where he served as Regional Trial Court judge until February 1987. He was then promoted to the Court of Appeals. In October 1996, he was designated Court Administrator by the Supreme Court.

Benipayo’s academic credentials are impressive. He graduated magna cum laude with a degree of Bachelor of Arts from the University of Sto. Tomas (UST) and cum laude from the same university’s Faculty of Civil Law. In college, he was editor-in-chief of the UST Law Review, president and captain of the college Debating Society, and president of the university’s Honor Society. After he became a lawyer in 1963, he worked in the law firm of the late Sen. Jose W. Diokno for nine years.

Although former Rizal Rep. Egmidio "Ding" Tanjuatco would have made a good Comelec Chairman (Ding asked the National Movement for Free Elections to withdraw his name from contention three days ago), Benipayo’s appointment instead is an excellent one, coming as he does from the judicial service. He has a solid reputation for integrity, moral courage and independence of mind. With the May elections approaching with the speed of an express train, he’ll have need of all these qualities – in spades.

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THE ROVING EYE . . . Alarmingly, one of the generals "short-listed" for appointment by the President as the next Armed Forces Chief of Staff is a fellow whose ill-repute offends many in the AFP – and, if he’s named, you can bet your bottom peso that some military mischief will be provoked by the resentment it is certain to engender. This general was involved in disgraceful smuggling activities, but that’s not the worst. He was instrumental in the supply of inferior-quality "kevlar" helmets and flak vests to the servicemen under his command – a sordid deal which resulted in the deaths of a number of troops in combat. What kind of vulture would endanger his men by foisting "junk" equipment on them – for profit? That’s the question President Arroyo must find an answer to before she leaps to "anoint" this cretin. Investigate first, Madam President. Your choice of the wrong man could be disastrous.