SKETCHES By Ana Marie Pamintuan Friday, September 19, 2008 Philippine STAR www.philstar.net Back in 1966, the Asian Development Bank (ADB) pondered the site for its headquarters. Its choices: Tokyo, Tehran and Manila. The Philippine capital won because the country was seen at the time as one of the world’s most promising economies. ADB officials in Manila told this story the other day to their guest in their “Eminent Speakers” lecture series, Kishore Mahbubani, dean of the Singapore-based Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy and a retired top diplomat of the city-state. Mahbubani, who remembers growing up in Singapore in a one-bedroom house with no flush toilet, told me that his country was not considered by the ADB because it was seen as a basket case. How we can mess up our country in just four decades. The ADB was not too far off the mark in its assessment. In 1960, the Philippines, with its gross domestic product five times greater than that of South Korea, was considered the secon...