JRS stands for Jovito R. Salonga, who died recently. Roughly 90 percent of the millennials do not know anything about him. JRS, to them, stands for the cargo forwarder, not the towering giant of Philippine politics. So here is a synopsis of his life and times.

Born in the 1920s, in Pasig, then a backwater that functioned as the commercial center – and political capital – of Rizal province. It was the pre-mall years, let us make this clear, for millennials now know Pasig as an asphalt jungle of giant boxy malls, skyscrapers and endless traffic gridlocks. Pasig then was just a few decades removed from the Battle of Manila and the Treaty of Paris. Carabaos and rice paddies were dominant at the town’s outskirts. Only the part of Rizal that was proximate to the City of Manila had the urban feel.

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