Destroying us. You are constructing us. It’s yourselves that you are destroying. - Arundhati Roy

Baby Kochamma had installed a dish antenna on the roof of the Ayemenem house. She presided over the world in her drawing room on satellite TV. The impossible excitement that this engendered in Baby Kochamma wasn’t hard to understand. It wasn’t something that happened gradually. It happened overnight. Blondes, wars, famines, football, sex, music, coups d’etat — they all arrived on the same train. They unpacked together. They stayed at the same hotel. And in Ayemenem, where once the loudest sound had been a musical bus horn, now whole wars, famines, picturesque massacres and Bill Clinton could be summoned up like servants.

In a while he reached across the table and took her hand in his. He could not have known that he was trying to comfort a building that had been struck by lightning.

Nietzsche believed that if Pity were to become the core of ethics, misery would become contagious and happiness an object of suspicion