Tuesday, January 29, 2008 Tantingco: Renaissance man of Mabalacat By Robby Tantingco Peanut Gallery
SINCE my hometown is celebrating its fiesta on Saturday, I am going to write about another native of Mabalacat, like I did last week (Ysagani Ybarra), just to show you the kind of people my little town is capable of breeding.
Town fiestas are usually occasions to name the outstanding citizens of the municipality, and they usually pick the ones with the most number of degrees, or the ones who made the biggest donations, or the ones who became famous and successful and rich and everything else that this world considers as big accomplishment.
Well, for a change, maybe they can also find a way to honor people based on character. Not education, not achievement, but plain and simple character -- the real stuff that a person is made of.
I know some of the people they honor are people who achieve fame and fortune, but for all we know, they have done so at the expense of others. There are also those who have become big in society but have, in private life, remained emotionally, morally and spiritually small and stunted.
Meanwhile, there are people we never hear about because they have never caught nor sought media attention, who live their obscure lives with great dignity and who work with absolute dedication and respect for others. There are also those who, by the sheer force of their unique personalities, have created ripples of change in their immediate environment but again, because they stay below the radar of public consciousness, we never know who they are.
One person you ought to meet is Jad Dayrit. You probably only know him through his column in another community paper. I myself have not seen him for years, so I will just reprint the article I wrote in The Voice way back in 2000:
If there was one person I truly, completely idolized, treated like a hero (if ever there was one in real life), it was Jad Dayrit. Right now he's in politics: formerly a kingmaker, recently a councilor, and presently an adviser to the Mabalacat mayor. I don't follow his moves anymore. I don't know if he's fallen from grace or he's still up there. But, nothing he's done or will do, could ever diminish the hero worship I accorded him in my youth.
The Jad of my youth was a larger-than-life figure. His reputation always preceded him. I had heard a thousand stories about him long before I met him, told by his past and present students, past and present friends, and past and present fans -- I emphasize past and present because for every group of people who knew him, there were always those who loved him and those who hated him, and those who stayed and those who quit.
When I finally met him, way back in the 1970s, when he was still a Physics instructor at Holy Angel University and I was taking a summer break from my studies in Baguio, I knew instantly that everything they said about him was true.
Everything. He had Einstein's disheveled hair and perhaps Einstein's I.Q., too.
He wore a Che Guevarra beard, which was risqué even in those radical times. He often wore an Army jacket and carried a duffel bag stuffed with books.
Books -- he was married to them. He slept with them, went to the bathroom with them, ate with them. His bedroom was not a bedroom, it was a library. On the inside cover of each book he'd written ex libris--Jad, meaning, "from the library of Jad." If there were 10,000 titles in his room, he'd read them all, you can be sure about that.
If you liked a book, he'd give it to you -- give, not lend. If you liked two, five, or ten books, they're yours. "Books displayed on the shelf are useless," he said. If he didn't buy new clothes, or missed his meals, it was because he spent all his money on books.
It was Jad who introduced me to Ayn Rand's books. I remember spending one whole night discussing them with him. One whole night, as in 12 hours of nonstop talking. We entered the restaurant at 7 p.m., ordered dinner, talked for what seemed like only 30 minutes because it was soooo much fun talking with Jad, and when we got out of the restaurant, I was shocked to see that night had turned into day, and it was already close to midday of the next day!
When I became a teacher in SLU, I fashioned my teaching style after Jad's. I began my class with a story to get my students interested.
We talked about anything -- the cosmos, astrology, ghosts, Shakespeare, Plato, UFOs -- and often we spent the whole class period excitedly talking about everything except the lesson for the day. To me, as well as to Jad, seeing students get excited about ideas was more rewarding than seeing them get good grades.
Jad was also a singer, composer, stage director, writer, photographer, God knows what else. He had an opinion about everything. They called him a "walking encyclopedia," and I think he deserved that description more than any other person who had been called that.
But what I truly idolized him for was his courage to stand by his unadulterated principles. He believed in the greatness of persons, respected their individual dignity, and defended them against any form of injustice. He saw a perfect world in his mind and he had enough faith that it could come true.
And in my youth, long before cynicism poisoned my thinking, I believed Jad. I was ready to drop everything and follow him. Had he established a religion, I'd have been one of his first 12 apostles.
And then the world turned. I grew up and grew old. From where I sat I saw Jad enter politics, which at the time surprised and worried me, because he was not the type. But then I thought that he was just being true to form: it was part of his dream of changing the world.
Today, I haven't been in touch long enough to know if he's closer to, or farther from, that dream, or if he still has that dream. For the sake of Mabalacat, and for the sake of this cynical world, I hope he still does.
