Video: What It Means To Be Human By Chris Abani

“The world is never saved by grand messianic gestures but in the simple accumulation of gentle, soft, almost invisible, acts of compassion” says writer/poet Chris Abani (of "Graceland" fame) in this tender-hearted TEDTalk given a few years ago. Part-biographical, part-philosophical exploration on what it means to be human, Abani shares anecdotes about growing up under a military dictatorship in Nigeria in the 1980s and sharing a prison cell with inmates on death row. Throughout all this he discovers one important truth: “there is no way for us to be human without other people.”