We beg to differ.
Which of the two should Filipinos demand more? This somewhat rhetorical question popped into my mind when I came across this article depicting yet another one of our country’s tantrums towards the foreigners. Recently, District of Columbia Councilmember Marion Barry earned the ire of the Philippine embassy for allegedly being racist towards our Filipino nurses…
Filipinos are generally good at English. At least that’s the impression foreigners get when they encounter us. It is also one of the primary reasons why foreign employers like hiring Filipinos. It is well-established that English has made its way into the world as a sort of lingua franca, and we wield it as an…
Read More “English proficiency is a continuous improvement process” »
Mini-marathons or Fun Runs for a cause have become the “in” thing in the Philippines nowadays. Like most things that become fashionable to the more fortunate of Filipino crowds, the concept behind the activity tends to get lost in its participants. Take the case of this NATGEO EARTH DAY RUN recently held in Manila. A…
Back in the Dark and Middle Ages, the Church was practically the State. It maintained a firm and oppressive grip on the lives of the people, bending them to its allegedly holy will. People suffered and were persecuted, and all of these were done in the guise of God’s divine providence. Faith became the sharp…
Read More “The 27th Law: Playing on People’s Need to Believe” »
It seems that there are certain groups of people who are looking to increase the tension between China and the Philippines with regards to the standoff at Scarborough Shoal. They’re doing it through a ubiquitous medium that we couldn’t think of existing without nowadays: the Internet. And they’re doing it by perpetrating what I call…
The Philippines is a country by colonial edict — much like the way the old Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia were, as well as many African nations. They are meaningless hollow pin-up states cobbled together for the sheer pleasure, vanity, and mercantile ambitions of their former imperial architects. In the case of the Philippines, even the name…
Read More “A sense of nationalism: The Philippines has no such thing” »
The recent furor over a ruling issued by no less than Donald Trump himself owner of the Miss Universe Organization (MUO) allowing transgender contestants to vie for the Miss Universe title sparked numerous debates around what it means to be a “woman” and what defines “beauty”. The Miss Universe pageant after all is a beauty…
Read More “What Miss Universe really stands for and why feminine beauty exists” »
Introduction When I visited Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia last year, I saw a banner run across the two Petronas towers with the following words in Malay on it: Daulat Tuanku As soon as I could, I searched on Google what this phrase means. It is more or less the Malay equivalent of the English expression…
Read More “Filipinos: like a ship lost at sea searching for a beacon” »