What is it about Charles Dickens’s A pasko Carol that propels so many readers, annually, to reread the “ghost story of Christmas” and watch its many film and play productions? What is the fascination? Did people not “get it” the first time, or fifth time, or twentieth time? Or is it, simply, that people are yearly drawn to old mga kaibigan with whom they have “grown up”, and who have witnessed their “growing up”; mga kaibigan like Jacob Marley, Bob Cratchit, Tiny Tim, old Fezziwig, the ghosts of pasko past, present, and future, and, of course, Ebenezer Scrooge. Are people not...

A Tribute to Charles Dickens


Way back in the seventies, we had no advanced technology, no bidyo easily available, and no Internet. Yet we had what no video or movie can impart. The power of the written word.
My father was an avid reader, and to form the pagbaba habit in us he would take us, every Saturday morning to the Pak-American book tindahan on the Elphiniston kalye (now Zebunnissa street) and let us choose whatever books we fancied. Today I thank Allah for blessing us with such a wonderful father.
I did not watch many of the great Victorian’s pelikula in my childhood , but I could describe,...