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Boatless Badjaos

Badjao houseboat
Badjao houseboat in modern times. (Photo from http://carrieannt.blogspot.com/2011/02/badjou-people-forsaken-but-not-god_16.html)

I was just telling my neighbor here, Kabsat Kandu, about a chance encounter I had with a Badjao beggar family who were stranded in flooded urban streets, minus their boat.

I was recently in Manila, gulping down my second cup of coffee in a rush to catch an appointment, when someone banged on the steel gate of the old family home (which now housed a printing press) where I was staying. She was waving a letter and shouting in an unfamiliar language. The noisy machine drowned her out, and no one else in the house seemed to want to indulge a visibly desperate beggar.

“My lucky day,” I told Kandu with no trace of irony. Continue reading “Boatless Badjaos”

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Women as blind items

Is it ok to "blind-item" women? Once upon a time I did it, not just once, not twice, but thrice. Well, not really, because at the end I outed one of them. Mentioned her by name at the end of the article, with explicit details. I hope I'm forgiven today, March 8, International Working Women's Day.

There’s this naughty genre of journalism that teases and titillates by posing “blind items,” in which juicy tidbits of gossip about showbiz and public figures are dangled. They give sparse clues and don’t identify by name. That’s why they’re called blind items.

Nearly every weekend, my spunky neighbor Kabsat Kandu tosses to me tattle tales like these, then chides me about not printing them in the newspaper I edit. So far we had steered clear from this kind of journalistic action, but today—for a change—I hereby make three women the subject of my first blind-item column. Continue reading “Women as blind items”

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You have your Bangkok, I have mine

A slice of Bangkok history
Everyone can partake of their own slice of Bangkok. This piece of street art along Ratchadamnoen is a celebration of color and innocence. But how many tourists are really aware that just a few minutes from here, just behind those gaily-painted walls, in a quiet and unobtrusive street corner, is a memorial to the October 14, 1973 uprising of heroic Thai students, workers and other citizens that led to the overthrow of military dictator Thanom Kittikachorn? That was one slice of Bangkok I set out to seek.

There’s a bit of a gentle rant here, but not a big one.

When I was told that my trip to Bangkok would push through, actually I was a bit underwhelmed. This was because–apart from the colleagues we needed to meet there and the critical collaborative work we needed to accomplish, which were of course the main reasons for the trip–I couldn’t think of any tourist feature of that ancient Siamese city along the Chao Phraya that made my innards pulsate with excitement. Continue reading “You have your Bangkok, I have mine”