This article is based on my intuitions.
What is intuition?-I have explained it by narrating a personal story, which is an appendix to this article.
I expect that Xi, Kim, Putin, Bolsonaro constitute the beginning of a new evil axis. With all the refugees, the Europian Union will become an Islamic State. The USA will Trumpit-meaning Trump plus Split. Canada will fracture. The liberal remains of the USA and Canada, India, Australia may be left holding the baby of the free world.
Africa, Asia, Arctic and Antarctic will become a battle ground, with the former’s human resources and the latter’s land & resources, a cynosure of conquering eyes. The Chinese will be the first contenders at all these places. They will be looking to subjugate other people.
A few words on slavery are in place here.
Human resources often become slavery in subtle forms. Many believe humans have progressed so much and communication has become so easy & advanced that slavery in modern times is not possible. It is my view that not only it is possible but it is much more feasible now. The same means which are believed to empower people are the weapons of the state. (e.g. the Govt of India can delete one entry in its Aadhar system and the corresponding person is simply switched out of existence).
Looking back for a moment, countries that acquired wealth over short periods (in historical terms) have done it by availability of cheap labor. Money was the driving force behind slave trade that enabled Europe and America to become rich. Cheap labour was obtained by some or the other form of coercion.
The low price of China’s product and China’s economic prowess has been acclaimed by all. Few realize that their “success/economic miracle” has been achieved by using her own people practically as slaves. Having reached this point, that China has reached, any country will like to give a release to its own people by substituting them with aliens.
The Chinese thus need and have much to gain by subjugating alien populations. Immediate neighbors are the obvious choice.
This is where the Himalayas come in.
The Himalayan Mountains, India’s traditional protection will have their role reversed-they will and have perhaps, already become an ideal springboard for attack on it.
This mountain chain on the north, north west and north east and the Indian Ocean on the South, protected the Indian sub continent so well that peace and progress prevailed for tens of thousands of years. Science & Art flourished. India became rich beyond dreams & came to be known as the Golden Sparrow.
This protection came with a downside. The Indians were conditioned to be inherently peaceful people, so much so, that, they proved to be sitting ducks when the Western Himalayas were breached through the Khyber Pass and the Muslims invaded India in the eighth century, leading to 1200 years of slavery. It was a fruit ripe for the taking, made an easy picking and was picked.
Mohammadan conquest of India is the bloodiest story in world history and the western Himalayas were renamed Hindu Kush mountains in the 8th century-the word Hindu Kush standing for ”Hindu Slayer” after thousands of enslaved Hindu men, women, children perished in these mountains on their way to be taken to Islamic countries as slaves.
73 years of independence (1947 to 2020) is too short a time in history for the character of a people to change. On the other hand, 1200 years of brutal slavery has resulted in a diminution of those genes in the Indian population’s DNA, which lead to desire to be independent and fight for liberty. Both the Islamic Conquerors and the Britishers, punished those who raised their head or hand in protest, by cutting them, in the most merciless manner imaginable. Children were bricked into walls alive, men were boiled in oil alive, bodies were left to rot, hanging from trees in every village, eyes were gouged out, women burnt themselves alive in self built fires, women who could not, were raped, forced into prostitution and killed. People who submitted or co operated or became informers or converted to Islam were left alive and rewarded. This process carried over centuries naturally left a population richer in people bearing servile and traitorous genes. I hate to say it but no evolutionary scientist will disagree-it is a sad fact. It has happened in America, in recent history, where you find the blacks bigger & taller–a consequence of selective breeding.
Perhaps with this background or for whatever reason, the Indians forgot Khyber Pass and failed to anticipate the dragon from the North. They let the Himalayas be breached from the North as also the North East and let the Chinese walk over the Tibetan plateau as also many parts of Northern Himalayas-a land where, in the words of the then, pacific Indian Prime Minister, Jawahar Lal Nehru, “not a blade of grass grew”.
With the intervening Tibetan plateau gone and transformed into a springboard, the Chinese simply have to dive down to New Delhi. Its fighter aircraft have an average head start of 20000 feet and that much is the handicap for the Indian fighter. Its radar will look down to a sweeping view of the entire North India. The Indian forces will have to climb up long & steep supply lines, through circuitous routes and in treacherous weather to defend its plains, whereas the enemy will be walking downhill. A look at the picture below shows the Indians face a steep wall and the Chinese face a gentle slope.
With climate change & deforestation, Himalayas will be bereft of snow, its glaciers and trees. The Vindhyachals in central India, bereft of forests will not soak & store water and the north flowing rivers, like Chambal & the Narmada will become seasonal rivers. The Indo Gangetic plains, are sandwiched between the Himalayas and the Vindhyachals. Relief map above shows that the Indo Gangetic plains are like a mere channel, dwarfed by mountains on the north and the south. They will turn into a desert. The desert will be flooded & be under deep water for a couple of months during the monsoons and dry thereafter. It will become the Serengatti of tomorrow.
Sea level rise often draws our immediate attention to coastal areas. Most people remain focused on oceans & the coastal towns. I feel that the real hit to India, will come on the so called Hindi heart land-the Indo-Gangetic plains, in the manner as above.
The climate change will help the Chinese. The Chinese will take control of head waters of all Himalayan rivers. They will dam all the rivers and use the power generated to pump the waters northwards into Tibetan plateau and beyond. Because of the high efficiency of hydro electric energy conversion, the additional power requirement for this will be minimal-may not be more than 10% of the power generated by the dam.
A desert now, where “not a blade of grass grows”, the Tibetan plateau, will turn into a granary for China. And the belt road will carry the goods to and from it.
The Himalayas have been formed by the world’s largest collision of continents-the Indian and the Eurasian tectonic plates and the subduction of the Indian plate below the Tibetan.
The Himalayas have a fragile geology. The weight** of the water held back behind all the Chinese made dams will upset this fragile geology. There will be more frequent and more severe tremors and earthquakes which will weaken the roads and the dams. Development activity in the mountains will also contribute to instability of the land mass. There will be consequential landslides of mammoth proportions. The debris will cause formation of new unstable lakes contained by weak barriers, which will give way, from time to time. A major earthquake will bring one of the dams down. As there is a series of dams on the same river (and that includes dams on its tributaries and distributories), a single failure will trigger multiple failures.
If this sounds like doomsday, it may be recalled that there have been 200 dam failures in the ten years preceding 2000. Failure of Banqiao Dam in China led to failure of 62 dams, >10 million refugees and >200,000 deaths. In 1975, when hit by typhoon Nina, China bombed & breached multiple dams to relieve pressure on their dams, to drain water and avoid a build up to the failure point.
China will reap all the benefits of the Himalayan dams, but, the failure of the dams will bring misery to India by unimaginable flooding and devastation. The then Chinese rulers will as much care about the misery of the Indians as the English cared about their hunger during the Bengal famine.
The Indians will be subjugated and enslaved and just as they fought the 1st and the 2nd World War for the Britishers, they will end up doing the labor jobs for the Chinese. The Rajas/Rai Bahadurs/Sirs of pre-independence years are already the Ministers of today’s independent India-they will seamlessly meta-morphise to become Provincial Administrators for China tomorrow.
The English had taken some time to realize that it would help educate the Indians and teach them English. Then they had braught Lord Macaulay in. The Chinese have already made mandarin language compulsory in Nepalese schools. Its implications do not need any extra ordinary intuition but will be lost upon the Indian politicians, squabbling over what language to teach their own people, sunk in making money and drunk with its power.
Climate change will hit India on other fronts also, even more seriously.
Much of Bangla Desh will go under rising sea water as also a large part of the India’s coast resulting in a huge migration and population jam. As Bangla Desh goes under water, India will bear the weight of its Islamic population, go the European way and turn into an Islamic state, but not before a battle between Islam and Communism. Burma (Myanmar) will also feel the heat, but will be saved because its Buddhist priests have learnt to hit the hand which smites their left cheek, rather than turn the right cheek also. India will remain mired in its inner contradictions.
River levels will rise as the sea levels rise. The Indo Gangetic plain is remarkably flat and narrow from the coast to the base of the Himalayas. The back flow will be felt a long way back. One of the manifestations will be the toilets, the gutters, the sewage drains (the so called ‘gunda nullahs’) backing up, during the monsoons. The effects of back flow will be supplemented by the deluge of precipitation on denuded mountain ranges. There will be a scramble for land and higher ground such as never been witnessed before. The govt, the municipalities, used to looking so far as the tip of their nose, will fail.
Data is a much respected word today. It is said that modern society is data driven. Everything is backed up by teams of well funded scientists conducting multiple studies, collecting data and processing it on super duper computers armed with hi-fi tools of artificial intelligence.
I have none of those resources.
It is just my intuition and I pray the future proves it wrong.
APPENDIX
Science is a product of intuition. But the mechanism of intuition has not been explained by science. THEN WHAT INTUITION IS ?
A true family story, will illustrate what I mean by intuition.
The story dates back to 1973 and it centres around my Nani-maternal grandmother.
She was past 75 at the time of this incident, very hard of hearing, with poor eye sight and in pain all the time. She passed away in 1975.
One cold winter night, we-my Father, my elder sister, my younger brothers, my spouse-8 months into family way, and Nani* were returning in our Fiat car from a wedding in New Delhi on way back to our home in Model Town, Delhi. Those were the days when the gear shift was fixed with the steering, no air conditioning, you kept the windows down in summer and up in winters, no arm rests serving as dividers in the seats and a whole lot of family could pack itself in a single car.
It was the wedding of a cousin, nick named Shuntie (name changed) and it was roughly the middle of a foggy night.
Shuntie’s mother was my aunt, commonly addressed by us as “Chachi”
My sister, in front seat, accosted my Nani, who was in the back seat: “Nani, how did you like Shuntie’s bahu?” (Bahu is Hindi for bride)
Nani couldn’t hear, the question was relayed and repeated.
She finally understood and answered:
“There has been a mistake. This Bahu will pull all the hair out of your Chachi’s head”.
After a stunned pause, we laughed and said:” Nani, you haven’t talked to her. You have barely seen her amidst all the crowd and loud music!”
She simply said:”You will see.”
Nani had never seen her earlier, nor talked to her and at best, she probably had a fleeting glimpse of her, that night. At least, thats what we think.
We all had found the bride perfectly normal and likeable. She had lived in the USA for long, was pleasant and educated.
It proved to be the stormiest marriage I would ever see. There were fisticuffs in the house, clothes torn, police every now and then, legal battles, divorce proceedings, threats, counter threats-the works. Everybody was compelled to take sides.
It went on for several years.
All that fighting, over things like jewelry, marriage expenses, division of properties, gifts, household belongings and more than that, over, nothings, like you said this and I did not say that and I meant that and you ought to have said that-endless bla-bla-bla-broke the back of most of the elders involved.
Finally relief-or that is what we thought-divorce order was obtained from a Court of Law.
One would think that was the end.
After separation for a few years, romance bloomed all over again-they both remarried,………………………….
…………………….to each other!
The only exception was my Nani.
She went to heavens in 1975 and was smiling down at us:
“I told you so”
How could my Nani-who could barely see, hear, walk, was in pain all the time, had no introduction to the girl-foresee it?
THAT WAS INTUITION.
*Nani is a Hindi word meaning maternal grandmother.
**Science has established that the weight of water held by dams in the Northern hemisphere has tilted the axis of the earth a little bit.
*** All the pictures have been taken from the public domain on the net. The pictures are not essential to the narrative and have merely a decorative value. Inadvertently, I might have taken some pictures which required permission from its owners. I beg to be forgiven by them and place my gratitude to all the respective picture owners on record.