I HADN'T known Joma from Adam, but that was 1968 and I was taking up civil engineering at the Mapua Institute of Technology, a neighbor to the Lyceum of the Philippines University at the Intramuros campus. I took a fancy striking up camaraderie with a small group from the Lyceum whose intellectual posturing just proved completely attractive. We would gather at the lawn of Fort Santiago after classes where we would spend hours discussing Machiavelli now, Victor Hugo next, McLuhan afterwards, or finally St. Augustine. Having hailed from a far-flung backward community in Catanduanes, finding myself 'dissertating' on such highfalutin' subjects certainly imbued me with an air of being a class of my own. One of the guys in the group, who wore an unsightly lump on one cheek and who answered with the surname Clemente, sensing my serious interest in intellectual pretension, whispered to me one time: 'I'll introduce you to Joma.'