Thank you for all the beautiful messages to my sister and me yesterday. You can’t know how much it means. For many decades the fear that shrouded our lives meant that we only heard cynical, painful comments about our mother - speaking to a nihilism and

lack of value placed on the lives of ordinary people in Sri Lanka. The degradation and ugliness of war had done that. A cynical acceptance that troublemakers and dissenters could expect nothing less. But in her short time with us, she had prepared us well.

Ideals shine brightest when they are needed - in the darkness. And she saw hope or the possibility for change in every person she talked to. Indeed, she died remonstrating with her murderer. She scolded him. The courage she demonstrated at that moment was the same courage...

That saw a reason to keep her lectures and exams going during war, to document war crimes when justice was a distant prospect, to keep on helping people others deemed as expendable. Courage and hope in the midst of despair is transformative. We must do it because we believe...

in a great truth that the authoritarians, the fascists and the murderers have been exiled from. That we ordinary people matter. Our lives, our feelings, our hopes and our wishes are precious and important. Never to be traded or erased for empty propaganda.