To witness, and help shape, history

At 19, we were handed a passport to the world.

- JOSE DE VENECIA JR.

Not through privilege, but through ink and paper-through journalism. We became a foreign correspondent and, soon after, Manila bureau chief of the first Asian news agency, the Pan-Asia Newspaper Alliance, founded by the late Norman Soong, General Douglas MacArthur's favorite war correspondent during World War II.

Those were heady days. We had a weekly column in the Philippines Herald, a newspaper that in earlier years was edited by none other than Carlos P. Romulo, Pulitzer Prize laureate, President of the United Nations General Assembly, and later, our Minister of Foreign Affairs.

We believe our destiny was forged much earlier, in the quiet hours we spent in our father's library, leafing through history books, biographies, and periodicals. The elegance of writing, the power of the printed word, the lives of great men and women who changed the course of nations-all of these planted in us a longing to witness history and, in our own small way, to record it.