I remember when I was a lot younger, way back in the 70s. I did not know we were supposed to be un-free, shackled by a military dictatorship.

With the effects of the strongman’s economic missteps still to be fully felt then, life was fun and idyllic on my island province. I, my friends, and our parents did not have a care. We never paid much attention to foreign exchange fluctuations. We had no idea what international trade was.

Also, during those days, teachers were accorded much more respect than they are grudgingly given now. And their take-home pay, although meager even by today’s standards, allowed them to buy much more than their and their families’ basic needs.

The apocalyptic devaluation of the peso had not yet come; and our government’s debt was not yet the millstone on our necks that it is now.

Looking back, however, I realized that my mother’s decades-long career as a public-school teacher reflects the ebbs and flows that our country’s socio-economic history have had, although a long, continuous decline would be more apt a description of the latter.

A couple of weeks or so, my mother had what her doctor described as a mild stroke. Somehow, that “mild” attack was ferocious enough to leave my mother unable to move her right leg and arm on her own. And as she lies on her sick bed, valiantly trying to convince us she is alright, I think of how the government has treated her and the thousands of other teachers like her with disdain and a scandalous lack of concern for their welfare.

There lays my mother, made invalid by the decades of selfless hard work and sacrifice that she made as a public school teacher. My love for her is dwarfed only by how much I detest a government that would not even lift a finger to help her in her time of need.

Nokia N8 Dying Off?

Nokia admitted recently that some units of its N8 smartphone are having power problems and are dying off unexpectedly. A company spokeswoman asserted, however, that the problem is limited to a “small number of handsets,” and that the company would fix them all as per its warranty program. The N8, which, some observers say, looks like the iPhone, comes with a 12-megapixel camera and a 3.5-inch display. It is designed to compete with market leaders iPhone and BlackBerry.
This power problems, however, greatly reduces the phone’s ability to compete for consumers’ mind.

Unmarried, Unphoned

The Baliyan council in India’s Uttar Pradesh state has decided to ban unmarried women from carrying mobile phones after some 23 young couples got married without their parents’ approval. The local government unit believes that these elopement and “unapproved” marriages, which are usually among lovers from different castes, are planned via mobile phones.

I wonder what those forlorn, starry-eyed lovers would think of next. Semaphore flags?