Think about it
Man of the Year
By Jun Velasco
“Every gift, though it be small, is in reality great if given with affection.”— Pindar
IN SPITE of the internet and other high-tech communications gadgets which have made the world a small village, we ironically find ourselves — instead of forging love and friendship — locked in fight mode.
We are engaged in fierce fighting, mutual hate, laban and every activity that threatens to blow up human existence to smithereens sooner than later.
Wherever you are — aboard a taxi, haggling with a fish vendor, opening a hello to a new acquaintance, browsing William Braham’s book, sharing a cup at the coffee bean, anywhere, anytime — try, just try opening a chat with a person next to you about what’s going on around us, you’ll end up in one inevitable conclusion.
It is this: our world, our country, our province, our city, our barangay, our neighborhood association, our home, everyone is glued to a fight mode.
Is this the legacy of Manny Pacquiao?
No wonder, it’s taking one guy grave difficulty to reconcile with his bosom friend.
Friendship? That’s a human virtue more precious than gold, and yet, these days friendship seems to have gone down the drain due to a simple difference in viewing things.
Why can’t people talk like brothers, children of the same loving God, soberly and attack a problem like a crossword puzzle?
Say anything, invent any rationale, justify why you refuse to reconcile with kaibigan, chances are you’d stumble into something that’s been eating you for a long time. It says “pare, huag kang patatalo, mga gago yan.”
We don’t try to put ourselves in the other’s shoes. So, fight, hate, put to work your Sun Tsu strategies, rally your hate-driven allies against the pet peeve till kingdom come. Reason, truth, the law, and what have you are on your side. That’s what you think, negative one.
At this point, we focus on a local guy, not a native guy who fits the image of one we wish everyone had in order to fashion a friendly world.
When he first broached the idea of bringing two friends deeply bruised by a fight-to- the-finish political feud, we thought Ashok Vasandani was crazy, had a simplistic, childish and out-of-this worldview of things.
But that was before. Not anymore. His childish or better, child like manner worked. We remembered Ralph Waldo Emerson’s advice on friendship – “the only way to have a friend is to be one.” We picked that line in high school while we were devouring every dust-covered book in the old city library.
A lesson in humility, Ashok reminds us of the greatness of the Indian people. Side by side with Rizal, we consider Mahatma Mohandas Gandhi, the national hero of India, among the greatest of men the world has produced.
It’s Gandhi’s self-effacing nature that united India and the rest of the world against the elitist British mis-rule. In the same vein, it was Rizal’s faith in the human race that clashed with the nationalists that has made him a world leader.
You see, if you only dare look at what’s keeping you from extending your hand, you’d find – Archimedes’ “eureka!” style — the absolute fact that no one is really minding your lousy business since everyone is busy minding his own or — in an altruistic sense — would rather use his time making the world he is in a better one.
But wonder of wonders in our global village, we are still glued to fight mode. A friend (?) blurted out his carefully kept passion: to hate somebody gives him extreme pleasure and celestial bliss.
Pathetic and, if we may quote from Elvis Presley’s album, that’s the way it is.
Back to Ashok who just organized a national association of Indian nationals in the Philippines. Congratulate him. He just did the “impossible.”
We believe it’s his simple, childish, childlike, brotherly style that has worked wonders in his successful advocacies.
We managed to ask common friends what they thought of Ashok and got a consensus—siya ay matulungin, lagging may dalang gift sa mga kung sino ka man, umbrella, calendar, wheel chair, ball pens, note books, books, good luck signage, cakes baked by beloved Kanchan, fried chicken, name it.
We picked him Man of the Year because we wish we could have forged impromptu friendships locally and now, nationally. It won’t be long if he goes worldwide.
By that time we might be together visiting old haunts in Agra and Delhi where cows freely walk the well-paved streets amid huge Neem trees, green foliage and ancient palaces written in poetry by cumpadre Al Mendoza’s favorite Nobel Award-winning writer Rabindranath Tagore.
Gonzalo Duque, who too has gone to the Taj Mahal, and this writer were debating If ”mahal” in India also means love.
At the rate Ashok is winning friends everywhere, the evidence is too overwhelming to be debated anymore.
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