VIEWPOINTS

As a young student, seeing my name in the Manila Bulletin for the first time felt like being handed a microphone in a room full of grown-ups—and being told not to waste anyone’s time. The thrill came with pressure: to earn the space, to prove I wasn’t there by accident, to write a sentence sturdy enough to sit beside voices I’d been reading long before I ever dreamed of joining them. I drafted and redrafted with nervous energy, learning quickly that in MB you weren’t “a stude

Imagine two ordinary freedoms that many Filipinos still can’t rely on.

I am writing this column because I know what fear can do to young people. I have watched it bend their posture before it bends their future, teaching them to shrink long before anyone tells them to. Fear does not announce itself as danger at first. It often arrives disguised as caution, responsibility, or realism. By the time you realize it has taken hold, it has already begun editing your life.

I write this in the first week of January, for the first time reflecting on the year that was while sitting by a fireplace. The warmth reaches my hands first, then settles slowly into my shoulders. It is a temperature that feels almost unfamiliar—despite years spent abroad, or perhaps because of them. I notice how my body responds before my mind does, how comfort can feel surprising when you haven’t realized how long you’ve been without it.

Originally published in Manila Bulletin It’s January 2026, and the quiet in my morning feels almost suspicious. Not the empty quiet of avoidance—the kind I used to chase. This is the quiet that shows up when I’m actually present. When my phone isn’t the first thing I touch. When last night didn’t end in “just one more.” When my body isn’t negotiating with my choices. I lace up my shoes and step outside. The air is cold enough to sting, and for a moment my mind tries to barga

We don’t talk enough about crying. Not the cinematic kind—one perfect tear sliding down a cheek—but the real, messy kind that leaves your eyes swollen and your breath unsteady. The kind that comes from frustration so deep it feels like a knot in the chest. The kind that arrives in the middle of learning something difficult, or failing at something you thought you should already understand.

Eight years ago, in 2017, my dad and I had our last conversation—and I didn’t know it would be the last. His death was sudden. There were no prior goodbyes, no long talks that eased us into the idea of life without him. One day he was there, and then he wasn’t. The kind of loss that doesn’t arrive with warning doesn’t just break your heart; it rearranges your world.

In a world that rewards speaking—publishing, posting, persuading—it is easy to forget the quiet, transformative power of listening. Not the performative type of listening where one waits impatiently for a turn to speak, but the kind that requires presence, humility, and a willingness to be changed. I have been thinking about this often, especially since joining the Indigenous Council of One Young World. It is one of the rare spaces in my life where listening is not just encou

Whenever I am asked what children should be taught to survive in this age of artificial intelligence, people expect me to list technical skills: coding, robotics, algorithmic thinking. But my answer is always the same, and it always surprises them.

We often talk about the age of machines as if it were a competition. As if every advance in artificial intelligence were a direct challenge to human worth. The debate seems permanently framed around whether humans can still keep up—whether we can think faster, perform better, produce more. But I’ve come to believe that this framing misses the point entirely. The question is not whether humans can compete with machines. The real question is: What kind of life are we building f

I keep a notebook in the pocket of my suit. Not the sleek digital kind that syncs to the cloud, not a tablet disguised as stationery, but a small, slightly battered paper notebook that feels like an anchor. It stays with me wherever I go. Sometimes it lies forgotten for hours, pressed flat against my chest; sometimes I pull it out three times in a ten-minute walk because a sentence, an idea, or a memory insists on being written down before it evaporates.

This year will be my third year away from home. Three years since I last lived in the country whose heat, noise, and contradictions shaped me. Three years since I last woke up to the smell of breakfast drifting from our kitchen, or heard the familiar rise and fall of my family’s voices filling the house. Three years of airports, visas, new rooms, new countries, new selves. And despite how much has happened, or how much I tell myself I’ve grown used to distance, a part of me s

I have been watching The Lord of the Rings for as long as I can remember. Long before I knew what a university was, long before I imagined myself leaving home, I knew Middle-earth.

A city reveals its values not through speeches or slogans, but through sidewalks, buses, corridors, crossings, and doorways. It reveals who it welcomes—and who it quietly leaves behind. And the uncomfortable truth is that far too many of our cities and municipalities are still built for only a portion of the people who live in them. Persons with disabilities remain afterthoughts in design, tolerated rather than enabled, accommodated rather than empowered.

History, we are told, is written by the victors. For a country like the Philippines—conquered, traded, occupied, and reshaped by forces far beyond our shores—that phrase has never been merely a saying. It has been a lived reality. For centuries, our narrative was crafted not by the people who tilled our soil, built our communities, and carried our culture, but by those who claimed dominion over us. And for too long, we accepted their version of our story as the truth.

Governments around the world are making grand declarations about their ambitions in artificial intelligence. Strategies are unveiled, taskforces formed, and glossy visions laid out in conference halls. Yet one truth remains stubbornly ignored: you cannot develop indigenous AI capacity without giving your next generation of thinkers—the students—the raw compute power they need to learn, experiment, fail, and build again.

There is a quiet turning point in life that arrives without warning—when the things that once made you shrink suddenly become the things that make you stand taller. I did not recognize this moment at first; it revealed itself slowly, in hindsight, as I began to appreciate where I came from and who I had become. For years, like many Filipinos conditioned by generations of subtle and not-so-subtle pressure, I believed I had to sand down the parts of myself that felt “too provin

I recently had the honor of being introduced by my counsellor, Vimbai Masiyiwa – and I’m still processing what that moment meant for me, not just as a young leader, but as an indigenous person trying to find my place in global conversations.