The best way to solve our problems would be to eat up all troublemakers

It has been nine years since one Otto Octavia White advised me to find a life. He advised me to begin living instead of filing this column week after week. Seven years earlier my late friend, Prof E S Atieno Odhiambo, had written to me from Rice University in Texas, “We are following your weekly perorations. Why do you worry about a society whose values a moth has eaten?”

At about the same time, my late grandmother advised me about a different situation. “My child,” she said, “Do you think you can heal the world? You cannot, my child. Nobody can heal the world. What matters in this world is to find something you believe in. When you have found it, live for it passionately. The rest you can leave to God.”