An afternoon with the strange & the boring

As a longtime writer for entertainment, the section that disinterested us the most was the Business sector. It was one for the books, we thought, for people whose muse was purely money and no heart. Who would be interested in that?

How mistaken we were. Without us noticing, silently, surreptitiously, Business was making inroads into our pages. And horror of all horrors, the Business pages had all but overrun the Entertainment pages. How, we wondered, could this have happened. Business is so boring, so cut and dried, why would people want to be bored?

Entertainment & Lifestyle keep the TV news sector alive! News anchors liven up their news by making jokes and references to film stars as well as basketball, football and rugby icons. We completely forgot that television and print are so different in audience appeal. A TV viewer is prone to change the station when bored. Print is more stable. People buy a paper or magazine to learn things, keep them on a rack, return to check on something or other. Print is an educator! TV is an entertainer! And this, we found when invited to attend a media conference of Asiaphil, a venerable 40-year-old company headed by Victor Batumbacal, its president and CEO.

With a handful from the media at the conference, Vic faced our group that his friend Tito Estrada, an artist-interior designer, had helped invite. We gathered at Annabel’s preparing to be bored and were met by Tito, Vic and his wife, the former Rina Narvasa. As the writers trickled in one by one, Vic and Rina engaged us in small talk. If they thought the group was strange, they were polite not to show it. In discovering that Rina was the daughter of former Chief Justice Andres Narvasa, then dean of student affairs at UST, Nestor Cuartero from the Bulletin and Tempo group just had to share his story.

Justice Narvasa was strict and forthright, related Nestor. When 21 staffers of the UST Varsitarian paper put out a lampoon issue in 1970, the justice felt they had overstepped boundaries and issued an order suspending the writers, asking them to apologize for their act. When the majority refused, Narvasa changed the order to expulsion. Parents of Nestor and students in the ranks of freshman and sophomore went to UST apologizing for their children and asking for reinstatement. “Five of us were reinstated,” Nestor recalled, “the rest had to leave the university.” We asked, what exactly was the issue about? It had the photos of the dean and other officers on the front page with the headline “Wanted Dead and Alive!”

The couple burst into laughter. The ice had been broken with Victor adding how he needed to behave himself before his father in-law. Not that his dad was any less demanding. Vic recalled how at age 14, his dad (the late Guillermo Batungbacal) assigned him to the family business Asiaphil, to the floor that manufactured electrical switchgears. Early on, his dad was training him for the hard task ahead. He also experienced traveling daily by bus for two and a half hours to Cabuyao, Laguna to the Asia Brewery plant to count the deliveries of sand for the brewery construction site. 

Slowly, he learned to deal with people from all walks of life, the denizens of the business world. When selling some properties of his dad, the buyer went straight to his dad to get a better deal! His late mom Filomena was just as enterprising and Vic also learned from her. He sold the meat she got from vendors who owed her money. Pretty soon his mom’s mahjong group, the Ateneo café, his friends became customers. He bought Banagan lobster and sold them to Au Bon Vivant, Hard Rock Café and The Peninsula Manila, carrying his goods in a crate up flights of stairs. He got hired by IBM, his dad’s mango plantation, Yutivo Corp., and in 1988, back to Asiaphil.

Vic sat in front of the screen ready with his powerpoint presentation on the progress of Asiaphil in its 40th year in the business. But he talked more of his experiences through the years, shared his dream of country development and bringing power and electrification through substations to the entire country, and answered questions from people like Isah Red who was curious on how Asiaphil’s presence in his hometown of Albay could curb corruption that was rampant.

How interesting, we thought, how two erstwhile competing sectors could learn from each other. Two days later, Asiaphil held a grand anniversary party for its employees. Everyone was drinking and dancing together. No longer do we think businessmen as boring. And we are certain, no longer do Vic and Rina feel us to be strange, undisciplined, bizarre creatures from the other side of the moon.

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