FLOATS depicting the Maguindanao massacre and giant effigies of boxing champ Manny Pacquiao and his celebrity mother Dionisia hogged the limelight at the 2009 Lantern Parade of the University of the Philippines Diliman campus Friday.
But it was the College of Engineering, celebrating its centennial next year, which won the best “lantern” for its entry, a diorama of Mother Nature and a robot, made from scrap material. A panel of judges named it the best among this year’s “lanterns” for its creativity and use of recycled material. The College of Engineering also displayed an e-jeepney, which is fuel-free and runs on just a Motolite battery.
These were among the dozens of “lanterns” on display at the Lantern Parade, which marks the closing of classes for the year at the country’s premier state university.
The Lantern Parade dates back to 1922, when the UP first had such an activity. In 1934, then UP President Jorge Bocobo formally made it a part of the academic calendar “so that students can have a frolicsome activity before the year ends.”
The university chooses a theme each year, and for 2009 it was the environment and the use of recycled material. Aside from the theme, national events and issues have also been the focus of Lantern Parades past and present.
The College of Law and the militant student organization STAND UP both had the Maguindanao massacre as their message. STAND UP had effigies of a backhoe and a wrecked van, both having become symbols of the killing of 57 people, 30 of them journalists by members of the warlord Ampatuan clan in Maguindanao on Nov. 23.
The College of Law had a tableau of the massacre victims with a mural of a gun-toting warlord as backdrop.
The College of Fine Arts outdid itself, as it has done every year, with several floats done by its students and teachers. Its “lanterns” carried an international theme, with such displays as the Filipino dessert halo-halo, a Chinese pagoda and dragon, a Thai elephant, and an Indian Diwali festival scene.
Its finale was the twin effigies of Pacman, as Pacquiao is called, and his mother, who is known to Filipinos as Mommy Dionisia.
The College of Fine Arts has been elevated to the Hall of Fame for winning the Lantern Parade competition several times in the past.
The UP Diliman Information Office said there were years when UP broke the tradition for various reasons. The first was in 1941, when World War II broke out and the university had to close. The next was in 1957, when UP students called for a boycott over the Board of Regents’ failure to name a permanent UP president.
There was also no Lantern Parade for years in the early 1970s when the country was under martial law. The last time that the Lantern Parade was called off was in 2006, when the university was embroiled in the issue of a tuition fee increase.