Tribute to Karim Manji

K - as your little brother, I haven't always taken your advice as seriously as I should have, but your TV recommendations were always an exception. As a teenager you got me into Dawson's Creek, Deep Space Nine, and The West Wing. You also gave me clear instructions to be a Pacey and not a Dawson. (Advice which is 100% correct)

Later on we both loved Mike Schur's sitcoms- but especially The Good Place, which you were hooked on as soon as you watched the first episode. And it might as well have been written specifically for you. 

It's a half an hour sitcom about what it means to live a good life and take right action. There are puns in every episode (like neighbouring Italian restaurants called 'Lasagna Come Out Tomorrow' and 'Penne for Your Thoughts'). It's a show about how hell is other people, but so is heaven. And at one point, a committee of well-intended liberal characters resolve that 'the only reasonable thing to do is to keep giving up things unilaterally until this demon is happy.'

Our last WhatsApps were about TV. We shared some memes about The Traitors - and I told you I finally got round to following your recommendation and watching A Man on the Inside - a comedy about grief and moving on which made me cry at the end.

I was always a bit resistant to letting you teach me and I now regret that a lot. But I've also been realising that you were teaching me things anyway. Like at a certain point in The Good Place, when two characters talk about death:

Picture a wave. In the ocean. You can see it, measure it, its height, the way the sunlight refracts when it passes through. And it's there. And you can see it, you know what it is. It's a wave. And then it crashes in the shore and it's gone. But the water is still there. The wave was just a different way for the water to be, for a little while. The wave returns to the ocean, where it came from and where it's supposed to be.

Thanks for all of the recommendations K. I wish you could give me a thousand more.