In the aftermath of Prince's death, an opinion piece by veteran British journalist Robert Fisk caught my eye. Fisk questioned the worldwide mourning of the pop legend, while the deaths of migrants trying to reach Europe were barely mentioned.
The piece was titled: When we mourn the passing of Prince but not of 500 migrants, we have to ask: Have we lost all sense of perspective? Fisk was not against people “this brilliant musician and the social revolution he represented".
But, he added, "I do wonder if we are going too far. When network TV presenters are expressing their condolences to the mayor of Minneapolis, and the Eiffel Tower has turned purple, there must surely come a time when we ask ourselves if our sense of priorities has not lost all perspective."
All Fisk was asking was that the world spare a thought for the others who had died. He did this in the way that many others ask when there has been some atrocious attack by terrorists, why Facebook and other social media often appear to value the lives of Western victims more than those in other regions of the world.
While I get Fisk's outrage and sadness at this unequal outpouring of grief for a pop star's death over the deaths of hundreds of other people, I also think that as human beings, whether we like it or not, these things are all a matter of perspective.
For instance, in this case, while we will never know whether one of the hundreds of children who died among the 500 migrants might have grown up to be another superstar whether in the arts or the sciences, we did know Prince and he had touched our lives in his way, and it did affect us more.
In the same way as when a close friend or family member dies, we are usually more affected by it than when we hear about the death of a friend's cousin's friend's neighbour. From where I sit, it is all a question of relativity and people should not be made to feel guilty about mourning one person in an unequal way to another.
As for me, Prince was one of a very small group of musicians that I am a massive fan of. It was not love at first sight but a gradual process, culminating in the film Purple Rain, which is where I reached the point of no return. So when he died, I felt as though I had lost a friend.
When migrants die trying to reach Europe or immigrants from one African country to another are attacked and killed by the locals of the towns they have settled in, as happened in Zambia recently, I also mourn the loss and, as an immigrant myself, empathise. I don't see it as having lost my moral compass, just a fact of my life as it is.
My own personal Prince moment happened at the 1988 Lovesexy concert in London's Wembley Arena, when my friend Leigh and I went to watch the master at his best. I still have the ticket stubb somewhere and will treasure it even more now.