Manila: One Train to Rule Them All

Here, we learn to take the matter with emotional ambiguity— sometimes hopeful for the dream of a completely modern, connected and ordered city; sometimes resentful of the decades-long static continuing to envelope the country and its people.

We criticize our cities—why they’re urban yet rural at the same time. We follow in the race, building more skyscrapers, mimicking New York, Shanghai, but our skylines are still adorned by the swinging of power lines and the passage of trains.

For me at least a new train line brings hope for the extension of the metropolis—more rush hours, more billboards, new places to work at after leaving school. It’s curious how a train line can map out one’s life—where to go, up to where can one go. It’s curious how a city plan decides our lives, and how so few of us have the power to go against it, escape it or change the plan entirely.

But even if they built one train line after another for the next few years, how long will it take to link up this nation of islands where brother and brother hardly trust each other? How long before there is One Train System to Rule them All? How long before we can include the countryside in the country’s future?

Here in this city, we learn not to hope too much. We’re scared of the prospect of new train lines, but don’t know it yet. We meet with scorn and dismiss the optimism of some. But at night, we secretly wish that their dreams were true, and that we too could do it—like our many neighbors in this part of the world had, in so short a time.


More musings at http://piabenosa.wordpress.com. Pia Benosa is also on twitter: www.twitter.com/piabeeee