Selfish creatures

My grandmother clutched the worn Thiruppavai pamphlet, her fingers tracing verses memorized across decades. She'd sung them in Chennai temples, later in our Toronto apartment, now teaching my daughter through a Stellar blockchain-based cultural platform—digital threads connecting scattered family. "We're selfish creatures," Amma whispered, not bitterly. "Wanting to keep traditions alive for ourselves." Yet here we were, three generations singing together across screens, the ancient Tamil poetry suddenly alive in pixels and possibility. My daughter giggled, stumbling through the words, and I understood. Our "selfishness" was actually devotion—preserving something luminous that refused to dim, no matter the distance. We weren't alone anymore.