Prints and Traces

Around a long-neck bottle of Emperador we gathered and happily exchanged holiday greetings and peered on each other’s radiant faces and exhibited our dirty-white teeth to one another and hummed or sang the jingle bells and silver bells the way we wanted our uneasy joy to manifest on this bright evening twodays before Christmas Day.

Reading Roland Simbulan’s book The World is a Classroom — and this time about Vietnam— I couldn’t help but breath a mute cry of deep, deep, deep admiration. My heart skipped and pumped into my eyes a teardrop.

A continuing discourse on Neoliberalism is needed in order to awaken all and sundry and address the perennial issue of poverty and underdevelopment that has plagued the Filipino nation for so long.

In Mindanao, especially in its southern regions, more than 29 battalions of the AFP’s forces are being deployed in the name of counter-insurgency, but ostensibly they serve as the “Sekyu” (security force) of the big foreign companies that are conducting large-scale mining activities operating in these mineral-rich areas.

Neoliberalism, as a capitalist doctrine, was formulated in order to provide a basis for the economic development of society.

One day he asked me, having developed a kind of deference to my educational attainment as a college dropout and was therefore a kind of leader among us ’all equals’ in the barkada hierarchy:

There is no hope that President Noynoy Aquino can redeem himself. He has sunk deep into a state of addiction much more serious than the prevalent drug addiction.

Mayor Rodrigo Duterte, who is fondly called “Digong”, has been reported to have already decided to run as presidential candidate for the coming 2016 elections.

On November 20, I will deliver a short lecture as part of a panel in a forum of literati dubbed Philippine International Literary Festival (PILF).

Malacañang has been consistent in its policy of pa-pogi or painting a pretty-looking image to the world—both in the domestic and international audience.