A Charmed Life As told to Sylvia L. Mayuga INQ7.net
August 11, 2006
It’s hard to disagree when people who know Rizalindo ‘Lindo’ Gigante say he lives a charmed life. How many people decided to leave their birthplace in childhood, and did – on a trampoline?
Not only did he leave his tiny island, Bantayan off the northwestern coast of Cebu. He flew off in a flying machine. Even better, he closed the cycle by returning as a folk hero – the island’s first commercial pilot. In 2003, at 38, Lindo Gigante was honored as one of his hometown’s ten most outstanding natives.
Now his international airline pilot’s salary is at par, if not a rival to salaries near the top of the Pinoy corporate heap. But that’s only part of the good fortune.
Far better are intangibles that reward a creative open mind soaking life in like a sponge, still a wonder-struck child in his pilot’s uniform – putting on the eyes of different cultures as he roams the world, paying the price of the priceless.
Off hours, he indulges an innate love for music, antiquities and the arts along with ravenous curiosity about how things work. Topped off with a passionate interest in people – all kinds of people, a lovely wife, a rollicking brood of six to share it all with, and you must admit – this guy is blessed.
It wasn’t easy getting there. He’s still paying dues in a high-pressure job and steep obstacles to an ever evolving dream, but Lindo Gigante –“beautiful giant.” in Spanish – is busy making his name an accurate description.
Bottom of the food chain
Like most good tales, this one started at the bottom of the food chain. From boyhood to adolescence in the little town of Santa Fe, Lindo lived a “tough, hardworking life tending pigs, driving pedicabs, navigating pump boats and fishing with nets – the regular island guy.” A hard-driving father cut him little slack for fun, so Lindo stole it, escaping with friends to roam fiestas in surrounding sitios and barrios.
More than larking, however, he was drinking life in big gulps. With intimations that he was not born to stay in Bantayan grew “a great hidden passion for leaving one day, never to come back, never again wake at dawn for chores before school.” A grandmother stoked his longing. Dipping into what she learned from American teachers early in the 20th century, she named “the capitals of countries and what things could be found there.” for a wide-eyed apó (grandchild).
Then she showed him photos of his grandpa as a soldier in World War II. Looking through parade and studio shots, an eight-year old had a flash, “Right then it came to me that when I’m dead my grandchildren will know me from my photographs, not only studio shots. They would show who I was, how I lived, the places I saw.”
Life was kindling his inborn gifts. By age 10, Lindo was flipping through another relative’s precious horde of National Geographic back issues when something clicked – and longing caught fire: he would travel and take just such pictures someday.
The first notes of Lindo’s life melody were emerging. To this day, his grown-up memory of personal encounters with photographer George Tapan and the former photography director for National Geographic, Steve Knipp, brings back a 10-year old’s rapture. Meanwhile he also sang for guests and his mother’s kitchen and farm seminars –talent enough to win cash prizes in local contests. More, whatever moved or looked new in Bantayan became a chance to learn more about the outside world.
Imagination on fire was morphing into determination. “I’ll work for honors,” he vowed, “it’s the only way out.” And so he did. Finishing high school as valedictorian earned Lindo a university scholarship. Five years later, in “sweet victory,” he graduated as class president and cum laude in Mechanical Engineering at the Cebu Institute of Technology.
But knowing only that he wanted to be “the best engineer” ever, he was clueless on what next. Again an island guest, a PAL employee, tipped him off on another window to the world –pilot-training. Of the thousand applicants to PAL Aviation School that year, Gigante was one of the 20 selected –“a good batch that makes me proud to this day,” he says, among them the first Filipina commercial pilot Aimee Carandang.
He earned his license in 1987 and was first officer in a PAL Sunriser in 1988, captain of a Fokker 50 in 1994, and Airbus pilot in 1997. But what’s a bright man with heart to do when one’s union decides to strike for globally competitive wages and, shall we say, more justice and honesty in management? In the midst of the Asian currency crisis in 1998, the PAL pilots’ union ALPAP challenged a juggernaut –the national flag carrier’s new owner Lucio Tan.
Eleven years of PAL flights now taxied to an end for Lindo. Married, with a growing brood, he returned to Cebu and sold eggs wholesale for a living. As the strike dragged on, a taipan’s rout of labor was on its way as relatives urged him to quit the strike. But his spunky wife kept Lindo steadfast –until a call from Air Macau after 22 jobless months invited him to a major turning: “Mag abroad na lang ako. (I’ll just work abroad).”
In a hemorrhage of PAL pilots trained to global standards, he flew for Air Macau in 2000, skipped to Singapore for Valuair in 2004, and moved to India’s Air Deccan in 2006. Higher and higher on fate’s trampoline, there was a new price to pay –long separations from family, except for the present three-month paid vacation that made him decide for India.
A Halo on Adventure
But it’s never been all work for Lindo. Between study hours back in Cebu, he followed his bliss in photography. Enter Armand Frasco, prizewinning artist from Dipolog, inviting him into the Images Camera Club, next introducing him to a candidate in a beauty contest he had just judged. Not only did Angel Sesaldo become Lindo’s wife. Armand became his best friend through years and oceans that soon separated two dreamers in diaspora.
“We have the same passion for photography and dreams for the country. We both wanted to be National Geographic photographers. My mind soars with that guy,” says Lindo in Hyderabad. “Dreams! Dreams! I can be what I want to be with him – CEO of a company, president of the Philippines, of the world. We plan and have lots of laughs in between.”
Their friendship began by arguing over a photo caption. Now it’s nourished with hi-tech. “Once he texted me from the cockpit. Yesterday he woke me up from a bazaar in India, with honking cars and what sounded like hissing cobras,” Armand ripostes from Chicago, calling Lindo “a flying Renaissance man.”
Indeed, talk geology and world weather, music and dance, film, cartoons, archaeology, museums, the paranormal –and the guy’s touched base, tried, studied, lived, taken a picture or mused about it.
Now flying an Airbus 320, aviation may be his job, but it’s his Nikon that haloes Lindo’s continuing life adventure “I carried my camera everyday of my life for the last 20 years and it would upset me very much if it's not with me. On my days off, I just get lost.” Such is his curiosity that he was once detained in a police precinct in Macau for wandering too far.
Introducing him to Flickr, a Grand Central of photography on the Web, was the next favor Armand did his friend –and the world. Now a computer screen opens to visual travelogues by a man-bird flying through unearthly beauty, landing in a kaleidoscope of time zones, just as he once dreamt.
Moments of a charmed life multiply– like “flying over the city of the Buddha, Bodghaya in the state of Bihar” in a state of exaltation, or “flying from Delhi to Kolkata in extraordinarily clear skies” last summer. Shooting the Himalayas from the cockpit, Lindo realized only upon landing: a Filipino team was approaching the peak of Mt. Everest just as he captured its snowy majesty from the air.
“My friends call me funny, crazy and all,” he says. All his life, elders and authority figures have scolded him to tone down his loud laughter. Why does he have to be so friendly with everyone, so curious about everything anyway?
Does he listen? Nope. It’s a life force, after all. In a while he confesses to having certain dreams that actually came to pass – as much in awe as friends in PAL who saw it happen. “Merico,” says Lindo, is an old word for shaman in Bantayan.
This giftedness, and his father’s miraculous escape from drowning in a storm off Bantayan with a plea to the Sto.Niño, underlay the generosity that had him helping a Filipino priest transplant the Sinulog festival to Macau. Flying in tapes and CDs of a Cebuano ritual for the Holy Child, he helped the Pinoy expat community keep the festival going until he left Air Macau. Hearing about it, more Visayan OFWs began their own rockin’ Sinulog in Dubai, he notes with glee.
Now he’s getting to know India There peacocks, eagles, mongoose and anteaters crossing the runway sometimes delay take-off, to much hilarity. But he also reports close brushes with mortality. He not only reads about sudden storms in ever freakier world weather, he flies into them, life on the line.
Lindo thinks about all that as he now paints and sketches besides snapping pictures. He also converses endlessly on the Net with family in Cebu and friends in a total of 18 countries – at rest from his flying machine, laughing, always laughing, this magnificent brown islander sharing a charmed life.
