अतिरेकी हल्ले आणि फावला वेळ

The very basis of human civilization was leisure ... spare time in which to indulge curiosity and experiment.
-Edmond Hamilton in "The Ephemerae" (1938)

The recent Mumbai attacks bring this back with full force in more than one way. If you look at the lower life forms, much of their time and energy is spent in surviving, not leaving them much time to experiment or to build higher structures. As Terry Pratchett said in "Equal Rites" (1987): Animals never spend time dividing experience into little bits and speculating about all the bits they've missed. The whole panoply of the universe has been neatly expressed to them as things to (a) mate with, (b) eat, (c) run away from, and (d) rocks.

With us humans of course it is different. We farm, build walls, build
hierarchical structures, and above all divide types of labors so that we can all get some time to try out different things, and generally relax. A clear move away from mere biological evolution.

The trouble is that we tend to take these things for granted and forget that it has been but a handful of centuries during which we have been trying to perfect this art. We are becoming civilized, but are far from being it. There are pockets of dissenters who would, without realizing that that is what it amounts to, pull us back towards barbarianism. We should of course resist that. What that means is that while this firefighting is done, we have to reduce our leisurely preoccupations, and give that time - call it an investment - to ensure that the structures we need in place are strong and secure and reliable. This includes a strong political will, an able law enforcement system, and, above all, law-abiding, non-stab-in-the-back'ing, non-shortsighted world citizens. In a welcome move many top business leaders in India have started saying that they need to take more interest in all the processes concerning the democracy.

If we value our time and wish our values to stay intact, we need to invest a fraction more of our time in examining and helping strengthen the basics.