By: Iris P. Concepcion
"Khaw thoht! Chiay pnom dai mai?" is another way of getting around this Thai campus where signages had been gilded in characters whose only thrust to personal familiarity are the numbers 2540.
Everything is in cahoots with the future. Old structures are refurbished, new ones are built in varying stages of design formatting. The amphitheatre is a cultural shrink of our own Cultural Center of the Philippines. The library frontage now bears a picture of the Kingdom's King adorned in pink and white. Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude would have gained effervescent colors with its quivering dark themes here. This is magical magic and no longer magical realism.
Not only are the pigtails sprouting out from human bottoms where some of Garcia's people are born with. The aesthetically-questioned manners of people from what the smug and newly affluent class refer to as coming from the "boondocks" is getting a well-deserved access through a 99 baht ice-cream in thick gelato-style of gastronomic feast. This is the poor having his just share of the world's bounties.
All altruisms for societal feedback is condensed in this educational diaspora of the awakened: citizens of an often perceived, laidback race. Time magazine had coined this the democratization of the Arab world. It started with the influx of Internet information. These young people are changing the way their elders must think. Thailand, bless its environment, is giving them another knock to the coming century.
How to build a race for the future? Let the cinnamons, pastries and juices come forth in their marching doughs, the extremes blending with the united. A common paragon of truth transposed onto a field of lies, giving its marginalized citizenry a new lease of world inclusivity. Einstein is filling in an imam's cap. Madonna influences the head gear "tudong." A world solidified both in action and thought movement.
Many might have pined for the calls of the wilds and the ways of jungle survivals but everything had been won over by spreading out the goods: material, economic and educational resources. We have divested the world of its pretentions for upliftment, those with impossible gates and humungous facades. The jungles had been stripped off its Tarzan pretenses.
Summoning it to another level of awareness, the people are fighting for books; for worldly manners of expression; for a chance to get toe to toe with the best minds with the rest of the world as it should be; for thinking first as a world citizen before being blindly led into a myopic sense of world distress.
A science camp is herding a group of students whose projects include writing and profiling Thailand's premiere artists. This includes a poet, a director and an author. In front of a makeshift airplane. Notebooks are given for free. Laboratories are filled with science materials; the designs campy and according to one student, "beautiful." The urge to fill their vocabulary valve with alternative words like "splendid", "functional" and "imaginative" is overtly strong. The young 'uns are baffled why a neck-ruffled woman in slip-ons is interested about their activities. She says, in jest, they are more interesting to write about than her lip implants. They did not understand but they laughed with her. Alive Poets Society is singing praises to the wonderment of genes and its surprising bowls of language showdown.
Self-aggrandizements had not shut the eyes of the fanciful into the forays of these visionaries nor did they lay impediments to what had already been planted.
"Bawk thaang hai rau dai mai?"
Which way to a particular destination is thus asked.
It is a query in showing a way to the future.
Where to?
The way had been laid.
And who is this guy who is in the shortlist of Noynoy Aquino's appointees for Ombudsman? Looks like he has solid credentials. I took my law school review at the Ateneo de Manila University (Makati campus) and this name is a byword in its halls.Given a free hand, Aquino does pick well.
Meantime, Mosquera has surprisingly emerged as the “underdog” in the four-way contest to get Aquino’s blessing to be the country’s next ombudsman.
Apart from Mosquera, commissioner in charge of legal affairs at the PCGG, the others who got five votes from the eight-man JBC were Carpio-Morales, Tuquero, and Armamento.
It was learned that Mosquera had also gotten the same unanimous vote from the JBC in the selection process for the deputy ombudsman for Luzon.
Mosquera got eight votes, along with Ombudsman graft investigator Roque Damian Dator, while Jardeleza and Vicente Gengos got seven and five votes, respectively.
“I am honored and humbled by the trust and confidence shown in me by the JBC,” Mosquera told The STAR in an interview Wednesday night.
7-year, 8-point agenda
Mosquera credited his strong showing in the JBC voting to his preparedness when all the nominees were interviewed.
He said he presented a seven-year, eight point agenda. The paper which he presented to the JBC was a product of his many years in various international consultancy jobs with the United Nations and United States Agency for International Development (USAID) on anti-corruption.
In entering the PCGG last year as an appointee of President Aquino, Mosquera had to turn his back on a high-paying job as head or “chief of party” of the Justice Institutions Strengthening Project (JISP), a USAID-funded Justice and Anti-Corruption International Development program in fledgling Southeast Asian country Timor Leste from June 28, 2005 to Nov. 5, 2010.
Before heading the JISP in Timor Leste, Mosquera had also served as senior legal adviser and program manager for anti-corruption of the Rule of Law Effectiveness Project, also a USAID-funded international development project in the Philippines from November 2004 to June 2005.
From July 28, 2004 to Nov. 20, 2004, Mosquera was the UN anti-corruption adviser to the inspector general of Timor Leste.
Conscious choice
“It was a conscious choice to fight corruption as a career,” Mosquera said. “I had a lucrative career path.”
But after serving abroad, he decided to come home to be closer to his family, and to fight corruption which has become a national problem.
As a young lawyer concentrating on cases in his native General Santos City and as president of the Integrated Bar of the Philippines chapter there, he successfully prosecuted a regional trial court judge for bribery and judicial misconduct in 1999.
Mosquera earned his Master in Laws from Kings College, University of London in 2002 under the merit-based Chevening scholarship.
He later earned a Master’s Degree in Public Administration from Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government where he received the 2010 Lucius N. Littauer Award for Academic Excellence and Leadership in 2009-2010.
He earned his Bachelor of Laws from the Ateneo de Manila University Law School with honors and was a recipient of the silver medal for academic excellence in 1992.
He placed second in the 1992 Bar examinations, regarded as the second most difficult bar examination in Philippine history.
‘My niche’
Mosquera recalled what he told the JBC that while his rivals for the ombudsman and the deputy ombudsman for Luzon posts may be authorities in certain fields, fighting corruption - the Ombudsman’s main duty - may well be his expertise.
“The other candidates are very, very qualified. Some are experts in human rights, I don’t know much about human rights; some may know more about the judiciary, I don’t know much about adjudication; some of them are corporate lawyers, I don’t know much about corporate law. But when it comes to fighting corruption, I really know much about it,” Mosquera said.
“I have dedicated the last 12 years of my life to fighting corruption,” he said.