ABS-CBN’s The Inside Story showed an episode on Filipino dog eaters last Tuesday which left me wondering exactly why watching it became for my family such an offensive experience. My children, typically liberal and modern, are not normally squeamish about these things. But this time they were screaming. The camera shows a light brown native … Read more
The Davao City prosecutor’s office has dismissed the rape complaint of Karen Vertido, executive director of the Davao City Chamber of Commerce and Industry, against businessman Jose Custodio, a former president of the same organization. The vote of the special panel of four fiscals who conducted the preliminary investigation was tied, 2-2, but Joel Hipe, … Read more
We thank Sarah for choosing to defend herself and suffer imprisonment rather than silently accept the degradation of being raped by her employer. We are grateful to Mansueto for showing that the Filipino is not just a spectator in the Olympics but can also win medals despite the absence of meaningful support for national athletes. … Read more
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