Sir: Reaction to the Peshawar tragedy has somehow eluded an emphasis on the need to look back with detachment. What have we done for the social uplift of the masses? How have we tried to check the evils of ignorance, poverty, flawed education or intolerance? No less disturbing is the usurpation of prospects and the ostentatious style of living of the so few versus the many. Multitude lives reduced to a small, nasty and brutish existence, exploited by the mighty to do their dirty jobs. The genie has grown out of the bottle, too big to fit back in it now. Its chemistry too has changed. When fanatics descend to the level of indiscriminate killing, it shows the colossal volume of hatred and anger that they have against what they perceive to be a highly unjust system, deserving total annihilation. Decades of manipulation and marginalisation in every field has left them bereft of the capacity to discern right from wrong. Graduating from blowing up the school buildings to mowing down the schoolchildren en masse is a fiendish but certain corollary of what we have been witnessing for more than a decade. The world has not moved on in a smooth manner, somewhere along the way it has seriously mis-stepped. Mounting the big guns and preparing the gallows might suppress the monster, but bottling it firmly calls for a cool moment of soul-searching. Each crisis and each tragedy that the country has sustained has invariably been tainted with the element of comeuppance. The phenomenon of militancy can only be curbed when the policies and priorities that bred it in the first instance are rolled back. Identifying the real threat is the need of the hour. The state will have to reset its priorities on the right path and invest massively in human development and social reforms. Stop denying their share to the poor and the downtrodden and the left behind in the resources of the state. As long as the privileged and the elite do not bring themselves to part with some of the riches in the way of common good, their ivory towers will not keep them out of harm’s way. Mani Karachi