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Friday, August 31, 2007

l'identité

The first time I traveled outside the country was in September 1999 when I went to Beijing for the second Asia-Europe Foundation Summer School. Back then, the summer school was just an experiment to see how young people from 25 countries in Asia and Europe could promote understanding between the two regions. Since then, the program has been institutionalized and renamed the Asia-Europe University. There are currently 38 countries represented in our alumni network.

Even if the Spanish monarchy made the Philippines its home for 300 years, in contrast to American powers who stayed for only 50 years, I wasn't really aware of the European influence in our country's lifeways, perhaps because it permeates their deepest levels: the Catholic religion, food, aesthetic values.

From 6th to 7th grade, I had great difficulty learning French in ISM, because I thought the only "logical" system of signifiers was American English- my mind couldn't comprehend, for example, how nouns for objects, like people, had "genders" (la chaise or the chair is feminine, while le stylo or the pen is masculine). Now that I am studying Spanish and Italian, which like French are Romance languages, I find that there is beauty and logic beneath foreign expressions, if only one is patient enough to listen and try to understand them.

That trip to Beijing opened my eyes to the Asian aspect of my identity, what I had in common with other peoples in Asia. Next week will be the launch of the Asia-Europe Society that seeks to form a new community and possibly a new identity: an Asian-European one.

The above picture shows me with my AU-2 classmates- pioneers all in this great experiment- on top of the Great Wall of China.

Sunday, August 19, 2007

love letters to a school


Before Justin and Alexa returned to the US, I showed them this box of letters their mom and I wrote to each other from 7th to 12th grade. I told them that they could choose one letter to bring with them back to California: the rest I would keep and someday destroy. I blanched when the two chose a "Mission S.F." letter, the second letter ever sent to me by Trish and probably the most valuable missive in the box.

Even before there was Second Life, Trish and I had an alternative universe that allowed us to comfortably navigate the treacherous social waters of middle school. I was the new kid on the block and Trish initially didn't want her barkada to know that we were friends: "Mission S.F." ostensibly meant "Mission San Francisco," but it really was a code for "Mission Secret Friends."

We even had secret identities: Trish was "Grant Mitchell," I was "Renée Beauchamp," and my mission was to capture for her the heart of "Elaine Brooks," who some of Trish's friends derisively called "the Farmhand."

Also in the box were notes from our friends from Pisay (or PSci). In 9th grade, Trish and I were part of the high school choir that performed in Philippine Science High School.

While we were singing a dreamy rendition of "I'll Take Manhattan," our demure girl found herself looking into the eyes of a mestizo boy from Pisay. After the concert, he must have observed my closeness to Trish, since he handed me a business card with his phone number: his name was Peter. When I was still studying in UPIS, I had wanted to go to Pisay myself- in fact, I had taken the ISM exams in order to practice for the Philippine Science exams, not knowing that I would become an IS Filipino Scholar. I encouraged the relationship until young love bloomed and Trish and Peter- officially, if not truthfully- became each other's first girlfriend/ boyfriend.

I reminisced about those days of mini-golf and three to four hour long telephone conversations some more when I read a post in Howie's blog on Pisay, Auraeus Solito's new movie. I missed it when it was shown in UP and I plan to go on a date with myself and catch it in Glorietta this week.

Sunday, August 12, 2007

bahag economics

I just finished reading Chris Anderson's The Long Tail. I picked it up after hearing about how Google CEO Eric Schmidt described his company's mission as "serving the long tail." The thesis of the book, in the words of Wikipedia, is that the Internet has made it possible for "products that are in low demand or have low sales volume [to] collectively make up a market share that rivals or exceeds the relatively few current bestsellers and blockbusters, if the store or distribution channel is large enough."

In yesterday's Jescom workshop on film, Nick Deocampo stressed the need for Pinoy film makers to focus on the distribution of works, echoing a theme in the book. The Long Tail, Anderson says,

is the culmination of a string of business innovations that date back more than a century- advancements in the ways we make, find, distribute, and sell goods. Think about all the non-Internet elements that enable, for instance, an Amazon purchase: FedEx, standard ISBN numbers, credit cards, relational databases, even bar codes.

It took decades for these innovations to emerge and evolve. What the Internet has done is allow businesses to weave together those types of improvements in a way that amplifies their power and extends their reach. In other words, the Web simply unified the elements of a supply-chain revolution that had been brewing for decades.

Indeed the true roots of the Long Tail and unlimited shelf space go back to the late nineteenth century and the first giant centralized warehouses- cavernous buildings erected on industrial lots near the junctions of railway lines in the American Midwest, starting in Chicago. Under their immese steel roofs, the era of massive choice and availability arose on towers of wooden pallets, built with the bulk purchasing afforded by then-new mass production. Railway cars delivered this new variety on a network of iron tracks that were transforming the country's economy and culture.
Among the innovations that paved the way for the Long Tail were:
  • the 1897 Wish Book of Sears and Roebuck, "786 pages of everything under the sun at prices that can hardly be believed," made possible by volume buying, railroads and the post office, and later rural free delivery and parcel post;
  • the supermarket, which first appeared in 1930 and proliferated in the 1950s and 1960s- it "helped create the Middle Class. Its low prices freed up substantial funds for families to spend on cars, homes, education and other needs and amenities of life;"
  • toll-free 800 numbers, which enabled an increasingly affluent suburban generation of the 1970s to shop from the home using credit cards
  • the Internet, which enabled the rise of e-commerce by "offering a catalog to everyone- with no printing and no mailing required."
In the Philippines, we see the Long Tail (what I also call the Long Bahag) in the sunrise industries of online schools (the Long Bahag of education) and global sharing or outsourcing (the Long Bahag of services).

One movement that seeks to ensure that the Philippines benefits from the Long Tail is the online signature campaign for Paypal to expand its services in the Philippines. Paypal is an e-commerce business that allows payments and money transfers to be made through the Internet. Show your support here.

Support Paypal for the Philippines

Sunday, August 5, 2007

lady justice

One of the things that seems to work in the US is the legal system. For a lawyer practicing in a society that is still undergoing a transition from a "rule of men (sic)" into a "rule of law," it was consoling to hear that this wasn't always so. A little over a century ago, for example, immigration officials in New York State were notorious for taking bribes from immigrants.

Last week, I found out about the Supreme Court decision dismissing a judge from the service for her gross insubordination and gross misconduct. I actually have personal knowledge of this judge and her "collection agent's" unusual practices: come to think of it, their actions or solicitations probably wouldn't have been unusual had they not been made blatantly.

A former Supreme Court colleague told me that Chief Justice Puno is cracking down on corrupt judges. While the problem appears to be systemic and its resolution would entail a lot of adjustment on the part of lawyers and parties who benefit from the status quo, this is a good start. We have to think beyond the short-term- of what would benefit our country and, ultimately, ourselves and our children in the long run.

I found this letter of Jose Diokno to his son Chel while researching in the UP Law Library last week- it was as if the late Senator were speaking to me directly, answering questions I've had for some time. He wrote,

Increasingly, as you grow older, the values that you have learned from us, your parents, and from your Christian faith, will be called into question- by you or by others. Why be honest when it pays to be dishonest? Why be fair to others when they are unfair to you? Why fight for others when they won't fight for you- or even for themselves? Why think for yourself when it is easier to let others think for you? Why lead when it is less troublesome to obey? Why have principles when others don't- and they often get away with it? Why be good when it seems so much more pleasant to be bad?

The answer, I think, is in what life means to you. If life means having a good time, money, fame, power, security, then you don't need principles; all you need are techniques. In fact, it's better not to have principles; they would just get in your way. On the other hand, if life means more than those things, if happiness counts more than a good time, developing your talents more than developing wealth, respect more than fame, right more than power, and peace of soul more than security; if death doesn't end life but transforms it; then you must be true to yourself and to your God, and to love and truth, good and beauty, and justice and freedom, that are His other names and that He has made part of our human nature.

You will have to decide for yourself, Chel, which of those things life means to you. Neither I nor anyone else can decide this for you. But perhaps this will help you decide: That even those who know they do wrong feel compelled to convince others- and eventually themselves- that they are doing right. So the man of greed often gives generously to charity; the megalomaniac poses as a messiah; the coward hides his fear under the mask of being realistic; and the guilty wash away their guilt, like Pilate, by washing their hands with the excuse that "it isn't my choice" or "it isn't my job" or "I can't do anything about it."