Never Enough

In the last few days of my trip to India, I thought, Oh! if only I could have stayed a little longer. And then I realized,it's what I would think even if I had stayed a year. No amount of time is enough to soak up all the love and attention ( though it does tend to slack off a bit after a month or two) Then I started to think when was the last time that I thought, alright, this is enough of ........, I am happy with it. Well, maybe my time at IISc. But in the end, I hadn't really wanted to leave so many things undone even there.
So my conclusion was, there will never be enough time or love or success that will make me think it was enough. I will have to strive to achieve the contentment, from as much as I have been endowed with. And of course, as is usually the case, all that deep thinking , wasn't really required to arrive at this conclusion. Everyone already knows this and if I were Shakespeare, I would have been able to put this common wisdom into better prose.
Taking a macroscopic view, the world will never have neough of Nelson Mandelas, Mother Teresas maybe even Einsteins, Isaac Newtons, J.B. Haldanes ( though, being in the scientific field, I have come to accept that all of the big scientists were not indispensable, someone would have figured it out anyway, maybe not with the same flare, but eventually..). I have started to think that while science maybe a hard conceptually and not everyones cup of tea , plus the ultimate thing that will help mankind in the end ( I don't mean the biblical end), being a politician can't be a cake walk either. And in terms of what the politicians ( and here I include thefreedom fighters, and the Hitlers) have "achieved" or have the power to achieve, scientists mostly because of how removed we are from reality ( needing clairvoyance to justify our existence) don't do so much for an average person. I know, I know, what about all the cures and the vaccines ?? well, I would think they rank much lower than freedom of movement and thought. Because while there can be enough freedom( Oh yes!! there is atleast one such thing) there shouldn't be too little of it. And I would prefer to die of a disease than live in a coercive and unjust society.

Maybe I am underplaying the scientists because I am one of them. Maybe towards the bottom rather than the top of the pile, but still. I think while we enjoy glorifying ourselves ( there can never be enough publications) the real world doesn't figure into our image of self. For as many of them as I have met atleast. I am sure, there are a lot of them into social work, but there is a reason we don't immediately think of a socially active or aware person when we think about scientists. They will all have opinions ( or else what use are their brains), but what they do with that.. is in short , not enough.