What matters?
When Viola Davis won the Academy award for best supporting actress in the year 2016, she gave one of the most memorable speeches ever. She spoke about dead people in cemeteries.She said, “People ask me all the time: ‘What kind of stories do you want to tell, Viola? And I say, exhume those bodies, exhume those stories. The stories of the people who dreamed big and never saw those dreams to fruition, people who fell in love and lost.” Although, I felt odd when I heard the speech live two years ago, the meaning of it became clear to me roughly three weeks back, when after Sunday mass I paid a visit to my father’s niche in the church graveyard. Often at times, I simply walk past the niches and the graves – the graves make me feel sombre thinking about the dead bodies lying underneath the slab covers, decomposing over time, while the niche fascinate me because generations of family members have entombed their remains together. Some of these niches even have a photo of the deceased, alon...