In September 2012, I was fortunate enough to have been one of the panelists of Mashable and Rappler‘s “Social Good Summit” in Manila. Here’s an excerpt of a feature about some insights that I and fellow netizen Jane Uymatiao shared with the audience. To view my full segment, please watch the video on the right sidebar. To view a summary of the  Social Good Summit, please click HERE. Hope to see more of you “super citizens” online! 😉 — ‘The tweet is mightier than the…Continue Reading “In the News: ‘The tweet is mightier than the sword’ (Rappler)”

Published in Rappler.com (July 27, 2012) MANILA, Philippines – He has had no formal training in filmmaking, and his path had once led him to playing guitar for the band DaPulis and a year of culinary studies in Florence. But for first-time filmmaker Jay Ignacio, the unspoken stories around Filipino Martial Arts became such a compelling theme that he spent 3 years of his life documenting some of the Philippines’ most prominent, living Filipino Martial Arts (FMA) legends in a full-length documentary called The Bladed Hand….Continue Reading “Jay Ignacio: Unsheathing the bladed hand (Rappler.com)”

At today’s Backdoor Arts and Music Festival, I performed onstage with the spoken word group Romancing Venus and was reminded of how much more beautiful life can be with poetry in it. I discovered poetry early on in life, using it as a means of expressing the pain and confusion that I often felt during my growing up years. I was a “child of a broken family” at a time when talking about parental separation was taboo, and back then I always felt that I…Continue Reading “Picket Lines: 100 Women and the Healing Power of Poetry”

I have always been fascinated with Islam, this richly colorful and grossly misunderstood religion and culture that has formed a large part of our history and identity as a nation. Growing up, I often found myself wondering about the veiled women that I would see on TV and in the streets, and our yayas’ and neighbors’ derogatory remarks about “the Muslims”, wondering what was so bad about this group of people that they (and “the Bombays”) were often used to scare us into obedience. When I…Continue Reading “Islam on My Mind (ProPinoy.net)”

(Originally published in the blog Out of the Universe, and in Inquirer Blogs)   In his piece on Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight for Time, Richard Corliss writes, “Nolan has a… subversive agenda. He wants viewers to stick their hands down the rat hole of evil and see if they get bitten. With little humor to break the tension, The Dark Knight is beyond dark. It’s as black—and teeming and toxic—as the mind of The Joker.” Having watched the film twice—first on Imax and next on a regular theater—I can’t help but agree that…Continue Reading “Why We Need The Joker… and 4 Other Political Lessons I Learned from The Dark Knight (Inquirer Blogs)”