The rhetoric of the Olympics may be about world peace and unity, but its everyday language is all about winning and superiority. Russia leads for the moment not because it has the most number of medals (the US does), but because it has more of the gold. The games are cruel in this sense. They … Read more
Dear Mr. Geniuval Cagas: I received your letter from Tinangis Jail and Penal Farm about a month ago. I know how it must feel to wait for some sign that the world out there still cares whether you exist. It has taken me all this time to reply because I have only vague memories of … Read more
At the UP, where Nur Misuari studied and taught in the ‘60s, we love to say we breed all kinds of characters — heroes and scoundrels, anarchists and bureaucrats, radicals and conservatives, militants and militarists. The UP will always, like any other school, claim its own share of heroes, but will never disown anyone of … Read more
If there is anything that has been proven in the ongoing debate on the issue of the Philippine Collegian editorship, it is that it is impossible to measure sense and style in numerical terms. We can have notions of good, better or best, but the difference in beauty and sensibility between an essay that is … Read more
They once formed a graceful trio that walked the length of the UP Diliman campus every day even before the sun was up. Their lively chatter covered a rich agenda: family and friends, national politics and social science, academic gossip and paths to spirituality. For more than 20 years, they were my family’s closest neighbors … Read more
Someone very dear to one of my children was kidnapped last week. He was on his way to visit her, but decided to stop by the busy Citimall on Commonwealth Avenue to buy something. Not finding what he was looking for, he did not stay more than 10 minutes. In full view of early evening … Read more
The business of selling conversations on the telephone started in highly urbanized societies where human beings must live together as fragments of a “lonely crowd”. The sociologist Johan Galtung quantifies the extent of this mass loneliness thus: 40% of all households in Sweden are one-person households, and 20% of all Americans say they do not … Read more
My friend Dodong Nemenzo, who lives near 2 churches in UP but never visits any of them, tells me that in Japan where he is currently a visiting professor, he goes to church when he wants to eat balut or dinuguan. I am sure however that it is more than the meal that follows the … Read more
I will not mention her name here. It was bad enough that I had to ask her what she was doing in Hong Kong. But then, how could I presume what job a B.Sc. in Agriculture graduate from UP is prepared to take on these days? UP students have this illusion that they belong to … Read more
This title, and such other morbidly graphic phrases as the “spectacle of the scaffold”, “gallows speeches”, or the functions of “punitive rituals”, are taken from Michel Foucault’s book Discipline & Punish. To Justice Secretary Teofisto Guingona and Senator Ramon Magsaysay Jr., who have both recommended TV coverage of public executions, I enthusiastically endorse this fascinating … Read more