interview

Fil-Am Ako feature

I was recently interviewed on Fil-Am Ako

Here’s a snippet:

What do you feel needs to change with Filipinos and how the world views Pinoys?
Change the name of the country. You can’t be mayabang (boastful, cocky) and celebrate Pinoy achievements/freedom while still having your country named after a colonial master. True, the rest of the world doesn’t give a s#!t what we do but if we change the name, we would be sending a message that we are creating our own identity rather than carrying a legacy or using our “ingenuity” to spin it in a positive light. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not under any delusion that simply changing the name of the country will resolve all our ills but I believe it’s a step in the direction of real freedom. Other countries have done it but still have their issues but at least they chose their path. Keeping our country name is like the divorced with keeping her last name for convince and sentimental value after her husband beated her for hundreds of years. She refuses to change it because she likes it, has nicknames around it and it would be a big ass hassle to change her drivers license.

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interview

Interview: Paul Morrow

Paul Morrow runs one of the most informative sites on Baybayin. Below is my interview with him.

Christian Cabuay
What got you interested in Baybayin? I assume you studied the script on your own, what was the most challenging part?

Paul Morrow
It’s a bit ironic. I became interested in Filipino/Tagalog many years ago when I discovered that Filipinos used the Roman alphabet. At the time I thought Filipinos probably wrote in Chinese or some “bizarre” script like Tibetan. That’s how little I knew. But when I happened to see a dictionary at a friend’s house, I thought, “Hey, I can read this. I think I’ll try to learn the language.” Then, a few years later, I came across an article by Lope K. Santos about the baybayin in a book for students of Tagalog. I was surprised because none of my friends had ever mentioned to me that Filipinos once had their own writing system. When I asked them I about it, they didn’t know what I was talking about. This made me very curious so I tried to find every scrap of information I could about the baybayin.

Learning the baybayin was the easy part; the challenge was finding reliable information about its history and usage. All I had in the beginning were second and third hand sources, like school textbooks. This was the dark ages before the Internet.

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interview

Interview: Bathala Project

Cass, my blogging partner over at PinoyTattoos.com interviews David Lazaro, a Baybayin artist based in Los Angeles, California. Look out for another interview next week.

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