chosen quotes from playing with water

"In Britain, a state linked to itself by televison which almost everyone watches, by newpapers millions read, glutted with opinion polls and phone-in programmes and protest marches and all the democratic ways of ensuring that there actually is such a thing as a majority national opinion about almost anything, such phrases (the will of the people and national sentiment) mean something. But how is consensus to be reached in a nation divided by eighty major dialects and eleven main language groups, linked by no reliable telephone network, where travel is laborious and often dangerous? A nation which in percentage terms reads little but comics if it reads at all, and from sheer forceof habit mistrusts its own Press. Loyalties are to family, to barkada, to gang, to community, to ethnic group" ( playing with water page 143).

at the time of writing of playing with water, as i've gathered from the bookend notes, the late 80's rate was 25 pesos to the dollar and thirty pesos to the pound. the book is a very enlightening read with apt descriptions of the promdi life and all its extroverted predilections. the chapter on manila's underbelly was not favorable. it was noteworthy that the author could namedrop every gang and syndicate that was the crux of tabloid headlines in the past two decades. but what do we expect from a metropolis that is not only a third world country's capital politically but also financially? manila is the center of being for most of the citizens. as for the telephone network, i was already twenty-two when our tiny cul-de-sac got access to a phone line. but then i grew up in the province, where life was slower and more mundane. i can't believe how hard it was to communicate in my youth. in this age of cellphones with quirky ringtones, text is the most overused form of interchange in the mallrat era, quite understandable as actual calls from a mobile cost a dismembered part of the anatomy.

for further readings on the book, this new york times article is a useful and polished reference. but did tiwarik really turn into a portobello golf course? and thirty years after discovering my sweet-natured homeland and its people and a few sunsets after decamping tuscany for austria, does the author still linger along the coast of "nowheresville by the sea" for a third of the year?

"But whatever i may mourn, it is revealingly not resident in any landscapes of my past. I do not miss the smallest heather-tufted mound of the English scene. I do not care if I never again see the South Downs, the tennis courts and patios of Beckenham, the hills and hopfields of Kent. Neither do I wish the dank water-meadows of Oxfordshire, de-poplared Binsey, ivy clad alma mater" (playing with water page 45 and 46).