But being young, you were insufferably restless. You regarded his teachings as little more than words pitched at you like paper missiles. His insistence on accuracy, accuracy, accuracy set your teeth on edge. You were less than mesmerized by his recollections of wartime reporting, of interviews with presidents. You felt fenced in by the walls of his classroom. You yearned to fly, to leap onto terra incognita, there to flex imaginary muscle....
v v v
Malay died at 89 on May 15, 2003, felled by a stroke. He had retired from UP about 25 years earlier, after serving as dean of student affairs during which he constantly defended the right of students to assemble and protest, even to put up barricades on campus against an increase in oil price—a high point in student activism that was famously called the Diliman Commune. The initial years between his retirement from UP and his passing from this vale of tears he spent in the trenches
It may happen that a teacher provides
sufficient provocation, as a grain of sand does to an oyster, to produce a pearl.
of column writing, and was imprisoned by the strongman Ferdinand Marcos for it. That was in 1982, when he was writing for the WE Forum , a tiny fortnightly that regularly launched fusillades of potent buckshot at the dictatorship.
The years after the assassination of Benigno Aquino Jr., a turning (because shocking) point for even those grown fat
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