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Monday, January 27, 2014

Confronting the nightmare of inferno

                Dan Brown’s novel, Inferno, sent me to dependable old man Webster. The word inferno is right there, not in some foreign language dictionary. “[A] place or a state that resembles or suggests hell,” e.g. “the hell of war,” and I went beyond Webster’s example by imagining chaos, devastation, and conflagration wrought by war. The WEBSTER Collegiate Dictionary copyright 1987 (the one available in the house) further defines inferno as “intense heat” as in “the roaring heat of the blast furnace,” a definition that can be scientifically explained. I next looked up the meaning of hell and got this among others: “the nether realm of the devil and the demons in which the damned suffer everlasting punishment.” Thus defined, the literature-inclined will likely associate inferno with Dante Alighieri’s epic poem, the Divine Comedy. The religious will have biblical implications in mind.

          The foregoing intro is meant to provide a perspective on the use of Inferno as title of the book. Dan Brown of the well-known Da Vinci Code tells in his latest novel about the hellish life in the world of the living, yours and mine, as when immersed in troubles, we dismiss the situation with a metaphor, “What a hell of a life!” But when problems overwhelm, indeed inferno it is — specifically attributed to Manila as the “gates of hell” in the words of Dr. Sienna Brooks, a British. Sienna is one of the main characters in the novel about to be victimized by maniacal sex in Manila, if not for an old woman who harangued the attackers.

          Former UP MassCom Dean Luis Teodoro wrote a deeply insightful column on Dan Brown’s Inferno (Hell itself, Vantage Point/BusinessWorld, June1, 2013). Excerpts: “…traffic jams horrendous enough to try the patience of saints… horrific poverty of the slums surrounded by oceans of garbage that contrast so sharply with the high-rise buildings and humongous malls that are being built all over the country… the sex trade, and some parents’ pimping off their own children…”

          I can only cite instances of my recent brush with poverty. On our way from the NAIA to the domestic airport for a flight to Iloilo, the taxi my husband and I were riding in was caught in traffic for several minutes. A woman with a baby in her arms knocked for alms. The taxi driver warned about opening the window to dole out some money because the boys sitting on the pavement will swarm around and beg as soon as a window is opened. When I narrated the incident at our Fil-Am Ass’n meeting, one Pinay said she learned that the baby is passed from one woman to another as a come-on for alms. This one may be a minor case of need: In downtown Iloilo, I experience being accosted by boys, even men and women, who entreat for a sale of the goods they are peddling because the money earned will buy lunch the family has been waiting for.

          Traffic?  A doctor relative who had just arrived from Manila recounted how, in the long wait for the green light, he dosed off to be awakened by the honking of the cars behind him. He said he had stayed up late for hospital work. I wonder how much of a bedlam traffic is in other countries’ cities compared to that in Metro Manila. Something’s got to be done about the jam, so I don’t have to hold my breath watching the taximeter tick away in every taxi ride I take in Manila and environs.

          Sex trade? A universal abomination, I must say. It is just as bad, even more so in other countries for all we know.

          In Dan Brown’s Inferno, overpopulation of the world is the gargantuan problem that overrides and abets sex, poverty, traffic, and related aggravating issues. Congestion brought about by uncontrolled human reproduction will suffocate the world leading to its damnation, a protagonist avers. What to do? With the usual episode after episode of a cliff-hanger, the book offers an interesting solution.

          It baffles me why Dan Brown picked Manila as an inferno of a place when many a deprived Third World city are just as besieged by similar problems. Because the novel spotlights the overpopulation theme, I went to Wikipedia for a list of cities by population density. Based on “the average number of people living per square mile or per square kilometer,” Manila ranks No. 1; No 2, 3, 4 are the cities in India; Pateros is No. 5; Mandaluyong is No. 6; No. 7 and No. 8 are in India; No. 9 is Caloocan; and No. 10 is a city in France. The list is long, but of the top ten, four cities are in the Philippines — thus calling for a rigorous implementation of the Reproductive Health Law which was approved by the 15th Philippine Congress last December.

          Concerned government authorities will find hard to chew Prof. Luis Teodoro’s conclusion of his column: “[Filipinos] can — they should be able to — do something about the traffic, the sex trade, and even the poverty. Otherwise Manila and many other places won’t be just the gates of hell; if things go on as they’ve gone on for decades, they’re going to be part of hell itself.” I say Amen to all that. Be it in ways big or small, it is incumbent upon every Filipino to confront the nightmare of inferno.  

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