May 2013 – PATHLESS TRAVELS

2013-05-312021-01-26

So I speak weird English. So what?

IRAIA thoughts

Some years back I attended a lecture on world English. The lecturer gave a very interesting presentation, with many insights that woke up a monster inside me from its long slumber. The presentation was about a study by Evelyn Nien-ming Ch’ien, when she was Assistant Professor of English at the University of Hartford.

The lecturer (whose name I still need to retrieve from my archives) quoted extensively from Ms. Ch’ien’s monumental 352-page work, which celebrated world English by tagging it as weird English. Explained simply, weird English is non-native English, which typically drops many of the arcane and complex rules of English grammar so that its non-native speakers can comfortably express their own cultures. Continue reading “So I speak weird English. So what?”

2013-05-252021-01-26

In the vicinity of the Gates of Hell

Makeshift tent of streetfolk along Timog Ave near GMA Center — First they were just daytime resting places, temporary parking spots for makeshift trash carts that competed in vain with SUVs and big cars for sidewalk space. Increasingly, the carts became sleeping cots with covers, like doghouses on wheels. In the rainy season the exposed ones turned into makeshift tents, like doghouses wearing raincoats. Many homeless folk have started to make the sidewalks along Timog Ave and EDSA their home, especially near the GMA Center. Not that there’s a significance of so many homeless folk living near one of the biggest media centers and a historic road this side of Metro Manila. But there’s irony simmering just below the surface.

“Manila deserves the tag ‘Gates of Hell’, when a man kills himself on the MRT tracks, and inconvenienced riders simply groan and say, ‘Namerhuwisyo pa.'”

That recent remark, posted recently on my Facebook page, was my little contribution to the fast-growing social media commentary among Filipinos that seethed around Dan Brown’s latest book, Inferno. Some Filipino observers had whipped up a titanic controversy out of a 3-page passage that described poverty-stricken Manila as the seeming gate of Hell in the eyes of the novel’s major protagonist.

For now I won’t dwell on the broad range of Philippine social-media reactions triggered by this issue. Here I merely want to share my own thin slices of insight into what our metropolis has turned into. Continue reading “In the vicinity of the Gates of Hell”

2013-05-142022-12-25

Conducting an electoral autopsy

An electoral autopsy

Most political analysts have already started to dissect the just-concluded Philippine 2013 elections—many of them focusing on the fate of individual senatorial candidates. Understandably, they pose such questions as why Grace Poe took the top spot, why Nancy Binay remained on 5th as predicted (despite the many brickbats thrown her way), or why Risa Hontiveros or Teddy Casino for that matter failed to land into the Magic 12 despite the all-out efforts and formidable strengths of their respective camps.