of geeky reporters and activist characters

yesterday was our last day in graduate school and i happened to be the last reporter. since the night before, i have been preparing for a postcolonial discourse on salman rushdie's MIDNIGHT's CHILDREN and the effort seemed to pay off because i didn't lose a nerve and prevented myself from repeating what our newly-crowned binibining pilipinas-world had done during the question and answer portion of the pageant night. the shawarma rice i ate before going to my class must have done wonders because i refused to fall asleep, to feel un-geeky or to humor my audience of four women with blunders like "us americans do not know their geography because they don't have maps so they should educate people from iraq, south africa and asian countries" or "i told you i'm so confident because i came from the tough ten...okay, eto na...my family, they was my inspiration." in that case, i would have asked for the earth to open up and devour me or for myself to disintegrate into a million specks of dust, just like what occured to the novel's protagonist.
i would have to discuss the postcolonial in MIDNIGHT'S CHILDREN in a separate blog, since my professor has asked that i and my classmates develop a publishable paper out of our respective reports. all i can let you zero in is that the novel's postcoloniality can be traced with its magic realism about which third world authors write most effectively, with the issue of fragmentation of personal and national identity after the period of colonization and with the alternative historiography as a way of the colonized people's writing back at the imperial center. mouthing academic words like these naturally did not spare me the teasing that i was being nerdy but let me ask you, was i any weirder than my classmate who, without so much as a sign, just ran outside the building to witness the torch-lit ecumenical rally for the ouster of the corruption-hounded president? any active student from the state u would have done the same, but less probably when the class was right in the middle of a literary criticism action. well, i reconsider: that is what makes UP students creatures all their own.