"We have now been living under the long shadow of the gun for more than a decade and a half, holding hope against hope for the survival of our children who are dominated by violence from all directions with out a purpose or meaning,. But, on the other hand, we also note the glazed faces of people accepting it all with a sense of resignation. Under these circumstances, to be objective or analytical seems to be a major effort, like trying to do something physical in the midst of a debilitating illness. Whenever we write we are dogged by this reality, fearing our losing the thread of sanity and the community submerging with out resistance into this slime of terror and violence. The community is bereft of all its human potential. Every "sane" person in fleeing this burning country- its hospital have no doctors, its universities not teachers,, its crumbled war-torn buildings cannot be rebuilt because there are go engineers or masons or even a labour force, its families are headed by women, and the old, the sick and the weary die with out even the family to mourn or sons to bury the dead. If our earlier account had appeared to be "plugging a line", as some would want to put it, it was because it was important for us to arrive at a syntheses in analysis seek an understanding, find spaces to organize, and revitalize a community that was sinking into a state of resignation. Objectivity was not solely and academic exercise for us. Objectivity, the pursuit of truth and the propagation of critical and honest positions, was crucial for the community. But they could also cost many of us our lives. Any involvement with them was undertaken only as a survival task. One day we sat down to discuss a postscript to our account. As an exercise we started laying out the complex forces in interaction. After the exercise one of us wrote in bold letters- A TRAGIC MESS"