“
Please. Do me this one, great favor, Jones. If ever you hear anyone, when you are back home...if ever you hear anyone speak of the East," and here his voice plummeted a register, and the tone was full and sad, "hold your judgment. If you are told 'they are all this' or 'they do this' or 'their opinions are these,' withhold your judgment until all the facts are upon you. Because that land they call 'India' goes by a thousand names and is populated by millions, and if you think you have found two men the same among that multitude, then you are mistaken. It is merely a trick of the moonlight.
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Zadie Smith (White Teeth)
“
In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements.
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George Orwell (A Collection of Essays)
“
Our population of 121 crore is not a limitation – it is the reason we will grow.
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Sukant Ratnakar (Open the Windows)
“
Who, in the midst of passion, is vigilant against illness? Who listens to the reports of recently decimated populations in Spain, India, Bora Bora, when new lips, tongues and poems fill the world?
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Lauren Groff (Delicate Edible Birds and Other Stories)
“
Symbolic value of the pickling process: all the six hundred million eggs which gave birth to the population of India could fit inside a single, standard-sized pickle-jar; six hundred million spermatozoa could be lifted on a single spoon. Every pickle-jar (you will forgive me if I become florid for a moment) contains, therefore, the most exalted of possibilities: the feasibility of the chutnification of history; the grand hope of the pickling of time!
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Salman Rushdie (Midnight's Children)
“
Facebook has more than 1 billion members, which by population makes it the third largest country in the world—somewhere between India and the United States. Who’s sending missionaries to that country? Who’s planting churches there?
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Phil Cooke
“
1. Bangladesh.... In 1971 ... Kissinger overrode all advice in order to support the Pakistani generals in both their civilian massacre policy in East Bengal and their armed attack on India from West Pakistan.... This led to a moral and political catastrophe the effects of which are still sorely felt. Kissinger’s undisclosed reason for the ‘tilt’ was the supposed but never materialised ‘brokerage’ offered by the dictator Yahya Khan in the course of secret diplomacy between Nixon and China.... Of the new state of Bangladesh, Kissinger remarked coldly that it was ‘a basket case’ before turning his unsolicited expertise elsewhere.
2. Chile.... Kissinger had direct personal knowledge of the CIA’s plan to kidnap and murder General René Schneider, the head of the Chilean Armed Forces ... who refused to countenance military intervention in politics. In his hatred for the Allende Government, Kissinger even outdid Richard Helms ... who warned him that a coup in such a stable democracy would be hard to procure. The murder of Schneider nonetheless went ahead, at Kissinger’s urging and with American financing, just between Allende’s election and his confirmation.... This was one of the relatively few times that Mr Kissinger (his success in getting people to call him ‘Doctor’ is greater than that of most PhDs) involved himself in the assassination of a single named individual rather than the slaughter of anonymous thousands. His jocular remark on this occasion—‘I don’t see why we have to let a country go Marxist just because its people are irresponsible’—suggests he may have been having the best of times....
3. Cyprus.... Kissinger approved of the preparations by Greek Cypriot fascists for the murder of President Makarios, and sanctioned the coup which tried to extend the rule of the Athens junta (a favoured client of his) to the island. When despite great waste of life this coup failed in its objective, which was also Kissinger’s, of enforced partition, Kissinger promiscuously switched sides to support an even bloodier intervention by Turkey. Thomas Boyatt ... went to Kissinger in advance of the anti-Makarios putsch and warned him that it could lead to a civil war. ‘Spare me the civics lecture,’ replied Kissinger, who as you can readily see had an aphorism for all occasions.
4. Kurdistan. Having endorsed the covert policy of supporting a Kurdish revolt in northern Iraq between 1974 and 1975, with ‘deniable’ assistance also provided by Israel and the Shah of Iran, Kissinger made it plain to his subordinates that the Kurds were not to be allowed to win, but were to be employed for their nuisance value alone. They were not to be told that this was the case, but soon found out when the Shah and Saddam Hussein composed their differences, and American aid to Kurdistan was cut off. Hardened CIA hands went to Kissinger ... for an aid programme for the many thousands of Kurdish refugees who were thus abruptly created.... The apercu of the day was: ‘foreign policy should not he confused with missionary work.’ Saddam Hussein heartily concurred.
5. East Timor. The day after Kissinger left Djakarta in 1975, the Armed Forces of Indonesia employed American weapons to invade and subjugate the independent former Portuguese colony of East Timor. Isaacson gives a figure of 100,000 deaths resulting from the occupation, or one-seventh of the population, and there are good judges who put this estimate on the low side. Kissinger was furious when news of his own collusion was leaked, because as well as breaking international law the Indonesians were also violating an agreement with the United States.... Monroe Leigh ... pointed out this awkward latter fact. Kissinger snapped: ‘The Israelis when they go into Lebanon—when was the last time we protested that?’ A good question, even if it did not and does not lie especially well in his mouth.
It goes on and on and on until one cannot eat enough to vomit enough.
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Christopher Hitchens
“
Pakistan was created in 1947, Hindus were 15 per cent of the population but were less than 2 per cent by 1998. In Bangladesh of 1931, Hindus were around 30 per cent of the population but are less than 10 per cent today.’ ‘Yes,’ said Thakur. ‘Contrast that with the Muslim population of India that was less than 10 per cent in 1951 and grew to over 14 per cent by 2011. Secularism is the only way to allow people to flourish.
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Ashwin Sanghi (Keepers of the Kalachakra)
“
Over the years, the British had strategically pitted the Muslims against the Hindus, supporting the All India Muslim League and encouraging the notion that the Muslims were a distinct political community. Throughout British India, separate electorates had been offered to Muslims, underscoring their separateness from Hindus and sowing the seeds of communalism. Teh Morley-Minto reforms in 1908 had allowed direct election for seats and separate or communal representation for Muslims. This was the harbinger for the formation of the Muslim League in 1906. In 1940, the Muslim League, representing one-fifth of the total population of India, became a unifying force. They were resentful that they were not sufficiently represented in Congress and feared for the safety of Islam.
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Prem Kishore (India: An Illustrated History (Hippocrene Illustrated Histories))
“
THE GENESIS OF THIS BOOK was a desire to find out what were the effects on society of the most lethal disaster of recorded history—that is to say, of the Black Death of 1348–50, which killed an estimated one third of the population living between India and Iceland.
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Barbara W. Tuchman (A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century)
“
In Delaware, the largest growth in population is Indian-Americans moving from India. You cannot go to a 7-11 or a Dunkin' Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent. I'm not joking.
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Joe Biden
“
In 1976, when eight million Indians were sterilised, Robert McNamara visited the country and congratulated it: ‘At long last India is moving effectively to address its population problem.
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Matt Ridley (The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge)
“
By 2060, India’s economy is projected to be larger than China’s because of its greater population growth. India is forecast to produce about one-quarter of world GDP from 2040 through the rest of this century.
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Jeremy J. Siegel (Stocks for the Long Run: The Definitive Guide to Financial Market Returns & Long-Term Investment Strategies)
“
Britain has no ‘white history’. British history is the multiracial, interracial story of a nation interdependent on trade, cultural influence and immigration from Africa, India, Central and East Asia, and other regions and continents populated by people who are not white, and before that, invasion by successive waves of European tribes most of whom, had the concept of whiteness existed at the time, would not have fitted into it either.
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Afua Hirsch (Brit(ish): On Race, Identity and Belonging)
“
The poverty in India is not because of spirituality, but because of not practicing spirituality and not knowing the technique of integrating spirituality with external life. Those leading the country now should become aware of this fact. India suffers because the leaders and people of the country today still do not have a unified vision for uplifting the country as a whole. They do not have an answer to the population problem, nor does there seem to be any immediate solution. I think India is surviving
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Swami Rama (Living With the Himalayan Masters)
“
Whenever elephants met men, elephants fared badly. Syria's final elephants were exterminated by twenty-five hundred years ago. Elephants were gone from much of China literally before the year 1 and much of Africa by the year 1000. Meanwhile, in India and southern Asia, elephants became the mounts of kings; tanks against forts, prisoners' executioners, and pincushions of arrows, driven mad in battle; elephants became logging trucks and bulldozers, and, as with other slaves, their forced labor requires beatings and abuse. Since Roman times, humans have reduced Africa's elephant population by perhaps 99 percent. African elephants are gone from 90 percent of the lands they roamed as recently as 1800, when, despite earlier losses, an estimated twenty-six million elephants still trod the continent. Now they number perhaps four hundred thousand. (The diminishment of Asian elephants over historic times is far worse.) The planet's menagerie has become like shards of broken glass; we're grinding the shards smaller and smaller.
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Carl Safina (Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel)
“
في بلد مثل الهند ينزل ألي الأرض حوالي 30 مليون نسمة كل سنة بينما لا يمكن أن ينتهي أي احصاء جماعي قبل 3 سنوات . و ما قاله ماوتسي تونغ لينكسون
حين سأله عن عدد سكان الصين و هو يجيبه :"هل تريدني أن أجيبك في أول الجلسة أو في أخيرها ؟" هو نكتة تعطي انطباعا أن بلد مثل الصين غير قابل للإحصاء الدقيق .
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الصافي سعيد
“
NOTHING should more deeply shame the modern student than the recency and inadequacy of his acquaintance with India. Here is a vast peninsula of nearly two million square miles; two-thirds as large as the United States, and twenty times the size of its master, Great Britain; 320,000,000 souls, more than in all North and South America combined, or one-fifth of the population of the earth; an impressive continuity of development and civilization from Mohenjo-daro, 2900 B.C. or earlier, to Gandhi, Raman and Tagore; faiths compassing every stage from barbarous idolatry to the most subtle and spiritual pantheism; philosophers playing a thousand variations on one monistic theme from the Upanishads eight centuries before Christ to Shankara eight centuries after him; scientists developing astronomy three thousand years ago, and winning Nobel prizes in our own time; a democratic constitution of untraceable antiquity in the villages, and wise and beneficent rulers like Ashoka and Akbar in the capitals; minstrels singing great epics almost as old as Homer, and poets holding world audiences today; artists raising gigantic temples for Hindu gods from Tibet to Ceylon and from Cambodia to Java, or carving perfect palaces by the score for Mogul kings and queens—this is the India that patient scholarship is now opening up, like a new intellectual continent, to that Western mind which only yesterday thought civilization an exclusively European thing.I
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Will Durant (Our Oriental Heritage (Story of Civilization 1))
“
The Obama administration has a strange theory. Terrorism is a response of uneducated human beings who have been disenfranchised politically and economically. If we can solve the ‘root grievances’ of the poor and oppressed around the world, there will be no more terrorists, and Americans will be safe. This view is of course absurd. If poverty, lack of education, and political disenfranchisement were the causes of terrorism, then much of India and most of China would be populated by terrorists. But they are not. And this is because terrorism is the violent expression of ideology, not objective conditions—what has famously been called ‘propaganda of the deed.’ The terrorist’s ideology may be secular and political—communist or fascist, for example—or it may be religious—Christian, Islamic, or even Hindu.
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Sebastian Gorka (Defeating Jihad: The Winnable War)
“
To many people today, slavery means white people holding black people in bondage. The vast millions of people around the world who were neither white nor black, but who were either slaves or enslavers for centuries, fade out of this vision of slavery, as if they had never existed, even though they may well have outnumbered both blacks and whites. It has been estimated that there were more slaves in India than in the entire Western Hemisphere. China during the era of slavery has been described as “one of the largest and most comprehensive markets for the exchange of human beings in the world.” Slaves were a majority of the population in some of the cities in Southeast Asia. At some period or other in history, as John Stuart Mill pointed out, “almost every people, now civilized, have consisted, in majority, of slaves.
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Thomas Sowell (Intellectuals and Society)
“
Do we have enough food to feed the people of the world as they become middle class consumers? The hundreds of millions of people in China and India who are now entering the middle class watch Western movies and want to emulate that lifestyle, with its wasteful use of resources, large consumption of meat, big houses, fixation on luxury goods, et cetera. He is concerned we may not have enough resources to feed the population as a whole, and certainly would have difficulty feeding those who want to consume a Western diet.
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Michio Kaku (The Future of Humanity: Terraforming Mars, Interstellar Travel, Immortality, and Our Destiny BeyondEarth)
“
If poverty, lack of education, and political disenfranchisement were the causes of terrorism, then much of India and most of China would be populated by terrorists.
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Sebastian Gorka (Defeating Jihad: The Winnable War)
“
Fill this city of mine with people as,
You filled the river with fishes O Lord.
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Quli Qutub Shah
“
Slow, static populations can afford slow, static economies. We can’t.
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Mihir Sharma (The Big Bang That Wasn't: Budget 2015 and India's destiny (e-Single))
“
The truth is that India is composed of a large number of small populations.
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David Reich (Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the new science of the human past)
“
There is a strong and fairly substantial theory in India as elsewhere that the gypsies of Europe originated in tribes driven out by Indian population displacements of the remote past.
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Norman Lewis (A Goddess in the Stones: Travels in India)
“
The Vedic people stopped interbreeding with the earlier local population and began to talk of purity only when they no longer needed women from outside their community as wives, because they now had enough girl-children whose early mixed roots, they decided, did not matter. And the British came up with their racist notions of not mixing with Indians only after the Suez Canal opened and there were fast steamships bringing white British women to India in search of British husbands. Purity is a convenient political myth floated by the powerful to justify brutal apartheid.
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Peggy Mohan (Wanderers, Kings, Merchants: The Story of India through Its Languages)
“
voice of the Congress was supposed to be the voice of sedition and of class ambition, instead of being, as it was the voice of educated Indians, the most truly patriotic and loyal class of the population. In
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Annie Besant (The Case for India)
“
Since independence, India struggled for decades with policies that tried to put the lid on its surging population. It is only recently that the country has been able to look its billion in the eye and consider its advantages.
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Nandan Nilekani (Imagining India: The Idea of a Renewed Nation)
“
Meanwhile, in 2015, there were 280 million smartphone addicts. If they banded together to form the “United States of Nomophobia,” it would be the fourth most populous country in the world, after China, India, and the United States.
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Adam Alter (Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked)
“
America failed during the late 1990s to forge an effective antiterrorism partnership with India, whose regional interests, security resources, and vast Muslim population offered great potential for covert penetrations of Afghanistan.
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Steve Coll (Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan & Bin Laden from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001)
“
Very little trade has moved between China and India over the centuries, and that is unlikely to change soon. Of course the border is really the Tibetan–Indian border – and that is precisely why China has always wanted to control it. This is the geopolitics of fear. If China did not control Tibet, it would always be possible that India might attempt to do so. This would give India the commanding heights of the Tibetan Plateau and a base from which to push into the Chinese heartland, as well as control of the Tibetan sources of three of China’s great rivers, the Yellow, Yangtze and Mekong, which is why Tibet is known as ‘China’s Water Tower’. China, a country with approximately the same volume of water usage as the USA, but with a population five times as large, will clearly not allow that. It matters not whether India wants to cut off China’s river supply, only that it would have the power to do so. For centuries China has tried to ensure that it could never happen.
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Tim Marshall (Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics)
“
Human populations have driven other human populations to the brink of extinction numerous times throughout history. Now the entire species threatens itself with mass suicide. Not because anyone is forcing us to. Not because we don't know better. And not because we don't have alternatives.
We are killing ourselves because choosing death is more convenient than choosing life. Because the people committing suicide are not the first to die from it. Because we believe that someday, somewhere, some genius is bound to invent a miracle technology that will change our world so that we don't have to change our lives. Because short-term pleasure is more seductive than long-term survival. Because no one wants to exercise their capacity for intentional behavior until someone else does. Until the neighborhood does. Until the energy and car companies do. Until the federal government does. Until China, Australia, India, Brazil, the U.K. - until the whole world does. Because we are oblivious to the death that we pass every day. "We have to do something" we tell one another, as though reciting the line were enough. "We have to do something" we tell ourselves, and then wait for instructions that are not on the way. We know that we are choosing our own end; we just can't believe it.
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Jonathan Safran Foer (We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast)
“
The Indian countryside has transformed into this wasteland of near-terminal despair and increasingly impossible survival, by new technologies, forced integration with globalized markets, and an uncaring state. For a sector which employs half the population, contributes a sixth of the GDP, the state allocates as little as a twentieth of total public investment. It is no wonder, then, that tens of thousands of farmers each year poison or hang themselves; and millions of the young flee, when they can, to wherever they can, while they still can. Unequal
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Harsh Mander (Looking Away: Inequality, Prejudice and Indifference in New India)
“
Once again I draw your attention to the difficulties India has had to encounter and her struggle to overcome them. Her problem was the problem of the world in miniature. India is too vast in its area and too diverse in its races. It is many countries packed in one geographical receptacle. It is just the opposite of what Europe truly is, namely, one country made into many. Thus Europe in its culture and growth has had the advantage of the strength of the many as well as the strength of the one. India, on the contrary, being naturally many, yet adventitiously one, has all along suffered from the looseness of its diversity and the feebleness of its unity. A true unity is like a round globe, it rolls on, carrying its burden easily; but diversity is a many-cornered thing which has to be dragged and pushed with all force. Be it said to the credit of India that this diversity was not her own creation; she has had to accept it as a fact from the beginning of her history. In America and Australia, Europe has simplified her problem by almost exterminating the original population. Even in the present age this spirit of extermination is making itself manifest, in the inhospitable shutting out of aliens, by those who themselves were aliens in the lands they now occupy. But India tolerated difference of races from the first, and that spirit of toleration has acted all through her history. Her caste system is the outcome of this spirit of toleration. For India has all along been trying experiments in evolving a social unity within which all the different peoples could be held together, while fully enjoying the freedom of maintaining their own differences. The tie has been as loose as possible, yet as close as the circumstances permitted. This has produced something like a United States of a social federation, whose common name is Hinduism. India
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Rabindranath Tagore (Nationalism)
“
What has Capitalism resolved? It has solved no problems. It has looted the world. It has left us with all this poverty. It has created lifestyles and models of consumerism that are incompatible with reality. It has poisoned the waterways. Oceans, Rivers, Lakes, Seas, the Atmosphere, the Earth. It has produced an incredible waste of resources.
I always cite one example; imagine every person in China owned a Car, or aspired to own a Car. Everyone of the 1.1 Billion people in China, or that everyone of the 800 million people in India wished to own a Car, this method, this lifestyle, and Africa did the same, and nearly 450 million Latin Americans did the same. How long would Oil last? How long would Natural Gas last? How long would natural resources last? What would be left of the Ozone layer? What would be left of Oxygen on Earth? What would happen with Carbon Dioxide? And all these phenomenon that are changing the ecology of our world, they are changing Earth, they are making life on our Planet more and more difficult all the time.
What model has Capitalism given the world to follow? An example for societies to emulate? Shouldn’t we focus on more rational things, like the education of the whole population? Nutrition, health, a respectable lodging, an elevated culture? Would you say capitalism, with it’s blind laws, it’s selfishness as a fundamental principle, has given us something to emulate? Has it shown us a path forward? Is humanity going to travel on the course charted thus far? There may be talk of a crisis in socialism, but, today, there is an even greater crises in capitalism, with no end in sight.
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Fidel Castro
“
In 1997, 42 percent of the population of both India and China were living in extreme poverty. By 2017, in India, that share had dropped to 12 percent: there were 270 million fewer people living in extreme poverty than there had been just 20 years earlier. In China, that share dropped to a stunning 0.7 percent over the same period,
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Hans Rosling (Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think)
“
The gathering of information to control people is fundamental to any ruling power. As resistance to land acquisition and the new economic policies spreads across India, in the shadow of outright war in Central India, as a containment technique, India’s government has embarked on a massive biometrics program, perhaps one of the most ambitious and expensive information gathering projects in the world—the Unique Identification Number (UID). People don’t have clean drinking water, or toilets, or food, or money, but they will have election cards and UID numbers. Is it a coincidence that the UID project run by Nandan Nilekani, former CEO of Infosys, ostensibly meant to “deliver services to the poor,” will inject massive amounts of money into a slightly beleaguered IT industry?50 To digitize a country with such a large population of the illegitimate and “illegible”—people who are for the most part slum dwellers, hawkers, Adivasis without land records—will criminalize them, turning them from illegitimate to illegal. The idea is to pull off a digital version of the Enclosure of the Commons and put huge powers into the hands of an increasingly hardening police state. Nilekani’s technocratic obsession with gathering data is consistent with Bill Gates’s obsession with digital databases, numerical targets, and “scorecards of progress” as though it were a lack of information that is the cause of world hunger, and not colonialism, debt, and skewed profit-oriented corporate policy.51
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Arundhati Roy (Capitalism: A Ghost Story)
“
In many ways, the partition of India was the inevitable result of three centuries of Britain’s divide-and-rule policy. As the events of the Indian Revolt demonstrated, the British believed that the best way to curb nationalist sentiment was to classify the indigenous population not as Indians, but as Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Christians, etc. The categorization and separation of native peoples was a common tactic for maintaining colonial control over territories whose national boundaries had been arbitrarily drawn with little consideration for the ethnic, cultural, or religious makeup of the local inhabitants. The French went to great lengths to cultivate class divisions in Algeria, the Belgians promoted tribal factionalism in Rwanda, and the British fostered sectarian schisms in Iraq, all in a futile attempt to minimize nationalist tendencies and stymie united calls for independence. No wonder, then, that when the colonialists were finally expelled from these manufactured states, they left behind not only economic and political turmoil, but deeply divided populations with little common ground on which to construct a national identity.
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Reza Aslan (No God But God: The Origins, Evolution and Future of Islam)
“
Every time the train stopped at a station, we would all hold our breath, making sure not a single sound drifted out of the closed windows. We were hungry and our throats parched. From inside the train we heard voices travelling up and down the platform, saying, “Hindu paani,” and, from the other side, “Muslim paani.” Apart from land and population, even the water had now been divided
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Aanchal Malhotra (Remnants of a Separation: A History of the Partition through Material Memory)
“
Anthony Fauci’s Report Card Death Rates from COVID per million population, as of September 30, 202120: United States 2,107 deaths/1,000,000 Sweden 1,444 deaths/1,000,000 Iran 1,449 deaths/1,000,000 Germany 1,126 deaths/1,000,000 Cuba 650 deaths/1,000,000 Jamaica 630 deaths/1,000,000 Denmark 455 deaths/1,000,000 India 327 deaths/1,000,000 Finland 194 deaths/1,000,000 Vietnam 197 deaths/1,000,000
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Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health)
“
The British conquered Bengal, the richest province of India, in 1764. The new rulers were interested in little except enriching themselves. They adopted a disastrous economic policy that a few years later led to the outbreak of the Great Bengal Famine. It began in 1769, reached catastrophic levels in 1770, and lasted until 1773. About 10 million Bengalis, a third of the province’s population, died in the calamity.11
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Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
“
The 10 countries with the most people (over 100 million each) are, in descending order of population, China, India, the U.S., Indonesia, Brazil, Pakistan, Russia, Japan, Bangladesh, and Nigeria. The 10 countries with the highest affluence (per-capita real GDP) are, in descending order, Luxembourg, Norway, the U.S., Switzerland, Denmark, Iceland, Austria, Canada, Ireland, and the Netherlands. The only country on both lists is the U.S.
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Jared Diamond (Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed)
“
An economically devastated Bengal became too weak to fight back the famine of 1769–70; it is estimated that 10 million, out of a population of 30 million, died. ‘In fact, British control of India started with a famine in Bengal in 1770 and ended in a famine – again in Bengal – in 1943. Working in the midst of the terrible 1877 famine that he estimated had cost another 10 million lives, Cornelius Walford calculated that in the 120 years of British rule there had been thirty-four famines in India, compared with only seventeen recorded famines in the entire previous two millennia,’ writes Robins. The Mughal response to famine had been good governance: embargo on food export, anti-speculation regulation, tax relief and free kitchens. If any merchant short-changed a peasant during a famine, the punishment was an equivalent weight in flesh from his body. That kept hoarding down.
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M.J. Akbar (Tinderbox: The Past and Future of Pakistan)
“
There is no getting away from it. It is technically possible to carry out the scientific revolution in India, Africa, South-east Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, within fifty years. There is no excuse for western man not to know this. And not to know that this is the one way out through the three menaces which stand in our way — H-bomb war, over-population, the gap between the rich and the poor. This is one of the situations where the worst crime is innocence.
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C.P. Snow (The Two Cultures)
“
India is about six times the size of France,” he went on, as the
glass of alcohol and a bowl of curried snacks arrived at our
table. “But it has almost twenty times the population. Twenty
times! Believe me, if there were a billion Frenchmen living i n
such a crowded space, there would be rivers of blood. Rivers o f
blood! And, as everyone knows, we French are the most civilised
people in Europe. Indeed, in the whole world. No, no, without
love, India would be impossible.
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Gregory David Roberts (Shantaram)
“
put the facts very briefly, but they are indisputable. Education. The percentage to the whole population of children receiving education is 2.8, the percentage having risen by 0.9 since Mr. Gokhale moved his Education Bill six years ago. The percentage of children of school-going age attending school is 18.7. In 1913 the Government of India put the number of pupils at 4-1/2 millions; this has been accomplished in 63 years, reckoning from Sir Charles Wood's Educational Despatch in 1854,
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Annie Besant (The Case for India)
“
After all, Malthus was wrong. Marx was wrong. Democracy did not die during the Great Depression as the Communists predicted. And Khrushchev did not 'bury' us. We buried him. Neville Chute's On the Beach proved as fanciful as Dr. Strangelove and Seven Days in May. Paul Ehrlich's Population Bomb never exploded. It fizzled. The Clash of 79 produced Ronald Reagan and an era of good feelings. The Club of Rome notwithstanding, we did not run out of oil. The world did not end at the close of the second millennium, as some prophesied and others hoped. Who predicted the disappearance of the Soviet Empire? Is it not possible that today's most populous nations -China, India, and Indonesia- could break into pieces as well? Why do predictions of the Death of the West not belong on the same shelf as the predictions of 'nuclear winter' and 'global warming'? Answer: the Death of the West is not a prediction of what is going to happen, it is a depiction of what is happening now. First World nations are dying.
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Pat Buchanan
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It must be said here that ‘Bharat Mata ki Jai’ is not an attribute of patriotism, but of deep patriarchy. Extreme mother-love is a camouflage for extreme misogyny. Over the past few years in India, the nature of the violence inflicted on women during rapes, riots and caste retributions is of an order seldom witnessed before in any part of the world, except perhaps, in Bosnia during the civil war, or in the Congo, or in Sri Lanka during the final moments of the pogrom against the civilian Tamil population there. From the barbarity of the jawans of the Assam Rifles on Manorama Devi, to incessant mass rapes by soldiers in Kashmir, to the graphic and horrific brutalities (that were videotaped) on even pregnant women in Gujarat in 2002, to the Nirbhaya case in Delhi, there is no evidence to prove that devotion towards an abstract ‘Bharat Mata’ translates into even a semblance of affection or respect for real flesh-and-blood women. Indeed, here it is only literally the flesh and blood that seems to matter. Add
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Romila Thapar (On Nationalism)
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THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE ARYAN INVASION THEORY Before the 1857 uprising it was recognized that British rule in India could not be sustained without a large number of supporters and collaborators from within the Indian population. Recognizing this, it was influential men like Thomas Babbington Macaulay, who, as Chairman of the Education Board, sought to set up an educational system modeled after the British system, which, in the case of India, would serve to undermine the Hindu tradition. While not a missionary himself, Macaulay came from a deeply religious family steeped in the Protestant Christian faith. His father was a Presbyterian minister and his mother a Quaker. He believed that the conversion of Hindus to Christianity held the answer to the problems of administering India. His idea was to create a class of English educated elite that would repudiate its tradition and become British collaborators. In 1836, while serving as chairman of the Education Board in India, he enthusiastically wrote his father about his idea and how it was proceeding: “Our English schools are flourishing wonderfully. The effect of this education on the Hindus is prodigious... It is my belief that if our plans of education are followed up, there will not be a single idolator among the respectable classes in Bengal thirty years hence. And this will be effected without any efforts to proselytise, without the smallest interference with religious liberty, by natural operation of knowledge and reflection. I heartily rejoice in the project.
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Stephen Knapp (The Aryan Invasion Theory: The Final Nail in its Coffin)
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China has some obvious advantages. It’s the one government that, at least for now, can afford to spend huge amounts of money to create unnecessary jobs to avoid political unrest. China’s historic successes suggest this might be the one country that can find a way to adjust, and the aging of its population could be a plus as the country needs fewer jobs in coming years than rival India. We all better hope so, because, month by month, the entire global economy is becoming more dependent on China’s continued stability and growth.
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Ian Bremmer (Us vs. Them: The Failure of Globalism)
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Cats are biologically at odds with the broadest patterns of human civilization. This was true from the first: Egypt, the first great agrarian culture, gradually lost much of its lion population. The Romans—who bagged big cats for processions and Colosseum spectacles—documented regional shortages as early as 325 BC. By the twelfth century lions were gone from Palestine, where they were once common. Before Europeans arrived in India, Mughal emperors fragmented the tiger population by razing forests. And so it went with all kinds of wild cats.
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Abigail Tucker (The Lion in the Living Room: How House Cats Tamed Us and Took Over the World)
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Urban planning is a scientific, aesthetic and orderly disposition of Land, Resources, Facilities and Services with a view of securing the Physical, Economic and Social Efficiency, Health and well-being of Urban Communities. As over the years the urban population of India has been increasing rapidly, this fast tread urbanization is pressurizing the existing infrastructure leading to a competition over scare resources in the cities.
The objective of our organization is to develop effective ideas and inventions so that we could integrate in the development of competitive, compact, sustainable, inclusive and resilient cities in terms of land-use, environment, transportation and services to improve physical, social and economic environment of the cities.
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Urban planning and Redevelopment
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AMRUT
Solid Waste Management
Master Plans
Community Based Planning
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Institutional Capacity Building
Geographic Information System
Riverfront Development
Local Area Planning
ICT
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Citiyano De Solutions Pvt. Ltd.
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Think about ethanol again. The benefits of that $7 billion tax subsidy are bestowed on a small group of farmers, making it quite lucrative for each one of them. Meanwhile, the costs are spread over the remaining 98 percent of us, putting ethanol somewhere below good oral hygiene on our list of everyday concerns. The opposite would be true with my plan to have left-handed voters pay subsidies to right-handed voters. There are roughly nine right-handed Americans for every lefty, so if every right-handed voter were to get some government benefit worth $100, then every left-handed voter would have to pay $900 to finance it. The lefties would be hopping mad about their $900 tax bills, probably to the point that it became their preeminent political concern, while the righties would be only modestly excited about their $100 subsidy. An adept politician would probably improve her career prospects by voting with the lefties.
Here is a curious finding that makes more sense in light of what we‘ve just discussed. In countries where farmers make up a small fraction of the population, such as America and Europe, the government provides large subsidies for agriculture. But in countries where the farming population is relatively large, such as China and India, the subsidies go the other way. Farmers are forced to sell their crops at below-market prices so that urban dwellers can get basic food items cheaply. In the one case, farmers get political favors; in the other, they must pay for them. What makes these examples logically consistent is that in both cases the large group subsidizes the smaller group.
In politics, the tail can wag the dog. This can have profound effects on the economy.
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Charles Wheelan (Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science (Fully Revised and Updated))
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So the history of the modern state can also be read as the history of race, bringing together the stories of two kinds of victims of European political modernity: the internal victims of state building and the external victims of imperial expansion. Hannah Arendt noted this in her monumental study on the Holocaust, which stands apart for one reason: rather than talk about the uniqueness of the Holocaust, Arendt sited it in the imperial history of genocide. The history she sketched was that of European settlers killing off native populations. Arendt understood the history of imperialism through the workings of racism and bureaucracy, institutions forged in the course of European expansion into the non-European world: “Of the two main political devices of imperialist rule, race was discovered in South Africa, and bureaucracy in Algeria, Egypt and India.” Hannah Arendt’s blind spot was the New World. Both racism and genocide had occurred in the American colonies earlier than in South Africa. The near decimation of Native Americans through a combination of slaughter, disease, and dislocation was, after all, the first recorded genocide in modern history.
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Mahmood Mamdani (Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror)
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The Western industrial complex would not change even if millions of people perished in Africa or India or some other faraway place. The population of the earth increases by millions every month, and such losses would be seen as a little drop in the ocean. But if something serious were to occur in the West, then that would turn upside down the currently held vision of Western people with regard to the impact of modern technology on nature. It would be something that would wake them up and perhaps help to stop this really suicidal course that modern civilization is currently pursuing and that the rest of the world is trying to follow.
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Seyyed Hossein Nasr (در جستوجوی امر قدسي)
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The columns and all the news on TV, and posts/discussions on social media, betray only one fact: that the educated in India, including the columnists and TV news editors, commentariat and intelligentsia, professoriat and bureaucrats, and politicians; are all economical illiterates and totally unaware of real India and her problems. The clever in India pick up some catch words, learn to profess fake sympathy with the unfortunate, and in a sea of medicocrity that is India’s ruling elite and the educated minuscule population just below it, happily go about parading their ignorance as knowledge and learning, and thus controlling the narrative
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Anonymous
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The columns and all the news on TV, and posts/discussions on social media, betray only one fact: that the educated in India, including the columnists and TV news editors, commentariat and intelligentsia, professoriat and bureaucrats, and politicians; are all economical illiterates and totally unaware of real India and her problems. The clever in India pick up some catch words, learn to profess fake sympathy with the unfortunate, and in a sea of medicocrity that is India’s ruling elite and the educated minuscule population just below it, happily go about parading their ignorance as knowledge and learning, and thus controlling the narrative.
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Anonymous
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When India and China - historically two of the poorest nations in the world - began to make fundamental changes in their economic policies in the late 20th century, their economies began to grow dramatically. It is estimated that about 20 million people in India emerged from homelessness in the course of a decade. In China, the number of people living on a dollar or less a day fell from 374 million in 1990, a third of the country's total population, to 128 million, in 2004, which is equivalent to just 10 percent of a population in China. increase. In other words, nearly 250 million Chinese began to live better as a result of a change in economic policy.
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Thomas Sowell (Basic Economics: A Citizen's Guide to the Economy)
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Look at Ireland with its Protestant and Catholic populations, Canada with its French and English populations, Israel with its Jewish and Palestinian populations. Or consider the warring factions in India, Sri Lanka, China, Iraq, Czechoslovakia (until it happily split up), the Balkans, and Chechnya. Also review the festering hotbeds of tribal warfare—I mean the “beautiful mosaic”—in Third World disasters like Afghanistan, Rwanda, and South Central LA. If diversity is their strength, I’d hate to see what their weakness is. The fact that we have to be incessantly told how wonderful diversity is only proves that it’s not. It’s like listening to a waiter try to palm off the fish “special” on you before it goes bad.
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Ann Coulter (¡Adios, America!: The Left's Plan to Turn Our Country into a Third World Hellhole)
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It is often said that the First World War killed Romanticism and faith in progress, but if science facilitated industrial-scale slaughter in the form of the war, it also failed to prevent it in the form of the Spanish flu. The flu resculpted human populations more radically than anything since the Black Death. It influenced the course of the First World War and, arguably, contributed to the Second. It pushed India closer to independence, South Africa closer to apartheid, and Switzerland to the brink of civil war. It ushered in universal healthcare and alternative medicine, our love of fresh air and our passion for sport, and it was probably responsible, at least in part, for the obsession of twentieth-century artists with all the myriad ways in which the human body can fail. ‘Arguably
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Laura Spinney (Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World)
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We all have our patchwork ideas of India, our notions and opinions and prejudices–often fallacious and absurd–of this enormous, disparate country, which, as I take pleasure in reminding newcomers, bigger in population than all but its own continent: Asia. It is a place onto which foreigners have projected their own exotic fantasies and fears, their explanatory and simplifying schemata. And they never seem quite to make up their minds–as they swing from one extreme to the other–whether this country is of great wealth or of appalling poverty, of spiritual renunciation or of unabashed materialism, of fasting or of gluttony, of erotic sophistication or of sexual puritanism, of corruption or of moral superiority. They probably fail to admit that it might be all these things, and even more so, everything in between.
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Sam Miller (A Strange Kind of Paradise: India Through Foreign Eyes)
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Case study: The Zoroastrians Would it really have been so bad if the Muslims had conquered Europe? After all, the Christians would still have been able to practice their religion. They would just have had to put up with a little discrimination, right? Although “a little discrimination” is all that most Islamic apologists will acknowledge about dhimmitude, the long-term effects of the dhimma were much more damaging for non-Muslims. Even centuries after the Muslim conquest of Egypt, the Coptic Christians maintained an overwhelming majority there. Yet today the Copts amount to just 10 percent, or less, of the Egyptian population. It’s the same story with every non-Muslim group that has fallen completely under Islamic rule. The Zoroastrians, or Parsis, are followers of the Persian priest and prophet Zoroaster, or Zarathustra (628–551 B.C.). Before the advent of Islam, Zoroastrianism was for a long period the official religion of Persia (modern-day Iran), and was the dominant religion when the Persian Empire spanned from the Aegean Sea to the Indus River. Zoroastrians were commonly found from Persia to China. But after the Muslim conquest of Persia, Zoroastrians were given dhimmi status and subjected to cruel persecutions, which often included forced conversions. Many fled to India to escape Muslim rule, only to fall prey to the warriors of jihad again when the Muslims started to advance into India. The suffering of the Zoroastrians under Islam was strikingly similar to that of Christians and Jews under Islam farther to the West, and it continued well into modern times (even to this very day under the Iranian mullahocracy).
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Robert Spencer (The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades))
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The bulk of the population of every country is persuaded that all marriage customs other than its own are immoral, and that those who combat this view do so only in order to justify their own loose lives. In India, the remarriage of widows is traditionally regarded as a thing too horrible to contemplate. In Catholic countries divorce is thought very wicked, but some failure of conjugal fidelity is tolerated, at least in men. In America divorce is easy, but extra-conjugal relations are condemned with the utmost severity. Mohammedans believe in polygamy, which we think degrading. All these differing opinions are held with extreme vehemence, and very cruel persecutions are inflicted upon those who contravene them. Yet no one in any of the various countries makes the slightest attempt to show that the custom of his own country contributes more to human happiness than the custom of others.
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Bertrand Russell (The Will to Doubt)
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In the empires of the Middle East, China, India, and Europe, which are economically dependent on agriculture, a small elite, comprising not more than 2 percent of the population, which the help of a small band of retainers, systematically robbed the masses of the produce they had grown in order to support their aristocratic lifestyle. Yet, social historians argue, without this iniquitous arrangement, human beings would probably never have the leisure to develop the civilized arts and sciences that made progress possible. All premodern civilizations adopted this oppressive implications for religion, which permeated all human activities, including state building and government. Indeed, we shall see that premodern politics was inseparable from religion. And if a ruling elite adopted an ethical tradition, such as Buddishm, Christianity, or Islam, the aristocratic clergy usually adapted their ideology so that it could support the structural violence of the state.
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Karen Armstrong (Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence)
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Without in any way diminishing the horror on the Holocaust, to a certain extent we can understand Nazism as European colonialism and imperialism brought home. The decimation of the indigenous populations of the Americas and Australia, the tens of millions who died of famine in India under British rule, the ten million killed by Belgian king Leopold's Congo Free State, and the horrors of transatlantic slavery are but a sliver of the mass death and societal decimation wrought by European powers prior to the rise of Hitler. Early concentration camps (known as "reservations") were set up by the American government to imprison indigenous populations, by the Spanish monarchy to contain Cuban revolutionaries in the 1890s, and by the British during the Boer War at the turn of the century. Well before the Holocaust, the German government had committed genocide against Herero and Nama people of southwest Africa through the use of concentration camps and other methods between 1904 and 1907.
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Mark Bray (Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook)
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THE FOUNDING PROPHET of modern antihumanism was Thomas Malthus (1766–1834). For three decades a professor at the British East India Company’s East India College, Malthus was a political economist who famously argued that human reproduction always outruns available resources. This doctrine served to rationalize the starvation of millions caused by his employer’s policy of brutal oppression of the peasants of the Indian subcontinent. The British Empire’s colonial helots, however, were not Malthus’s only targets. Rather, his Essay on the Principle of Population (first published in 1798 and later expanded in numerous further editions) was initially penned as a direct attack on such Enlightenment revolutionaries as William Godwin and the Marquis de Condorcet, who advanced the notion that human liberty, expanding knowledge, and technological progress could ultimately make possible a decent life for all mankind. Malthus prescribed specific policies to keep population down by raising the death rate:
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Robert Zubrin (Merchants of Despair: Radical Environmentalists, Criminal Pseudo-Scientists, and the Fatal Cult of Antihumanism)
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What is the effect of being made to live this way over a long period? The answer is in the numbers: After nearly 1,400 years of living as dhimmis and experiencing the true nature of Islamic tolerance, Zoroastrians today make up less than 2 percent of the population of Iran (and even less than that in India, where they fled for refuge). In Afghanistan, where Zoroastrianism also once thrived, Zoroastrians today are virtually nonexistent. This is no surprise: Conversion to Islam was often the only way these persecuted people could have any hope of living a decent life. If the Crusaders had not held off the Muslims, and Islamic jihads had ultimately finished off Christendom, would Christians in Europe have become a tiny minority, like their coreligionists in the Middle East (where Christianity was once the dominant religion) and the Zoroastrians? Would the achievements of European Christian civilization be treated no better than trash, as Islamic societies generally tend to regard the “pre-Islamic period of ignorance” in their histories?
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Robert Spencer (The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades))
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Ominously, food production is beginning to flatten out, both in world grain production and in food harvested from the oceans. The UK government’s chief scientist warned of a perfect storm of exploding population and falling food and energy supplies by 2030. The world will have to produce 70 percent more food by 2050 to feed an extra 2.3 billion people, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization has said, or else face disaster. These projections may underestimate the true scope of the problem. With hundreds of millions of people from China and India entering the middle class, they will want to enjoy the same luxuries that they have seen in Hollywood movies—such as two cars, spacious suburban homes, hamburgers and French fries, etc.—and may strain the world’s resources. In fact, Lester Brown, one of the world’s leading environmentalists and founder of the World Watch Institute in Washington, D.C., confided to me that the world may not be able to handle the strain of providing a middle-class lifestyle to so many hundreds of millions of people.
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Michio Kaku (Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100)
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My confusion about the separation between the servant class and the upper middle class revealed a quintessentially American point of view. Status is much more fluid in America, at least within the wide range of the population that can loosely be characterized as middle-class. I wait tables at a restaurant, and after my shift is over, I go out to a lounge and someone waits on me. Even if I get a graduate degree and earn a six-figure salary, I don’t treat waiters like a permanently lower class. After all, I was one and know what it feels like. And who knows when someone serving me in this restaurant will get their own graduate degree and be my boss. Better to be friendly. My “American-ness” was starting to stare me in the face in India: not the America of big-screen televisions and Hummers, but the America that, despite its constant failings, managed to inculcate in its citizens a set of humanizing values—the dignity of labor, the fundamental equality of human beings, mobility based on drive and talent, the opportunity to create and contribute.
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Eboo Patel (Acts of Faith: The Story of an American Muslim, the Struggle for the Soul of a Generation)
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Suppose I am told that a certain sample of wheat comes from Lahore, and that I do not know where Lahore is. I look it out in the gazetteer and ascertain that it is the capital of the Punjab.… If I know nothing of geography, I shall get up with the idea that Lahore is in India, and that will be about all. If I have been properly trained in geography, the word Punjab will … probably connote to me many things. I shall see Lahore in the northern angle of India. I shall picture it in a great plain, at the foot of a snowy range, in the midst of the rivers of the Indus system. I shall think of the monsoons and the desert, of the water brought from the mountains by the irrigation canals. I shall know the climate, the seed time, and the harvest. Kurrachee and the Suez Canal will shine out from my mental map. I shall be able to calculate at what time of the year the cargoes will be delivered in England. Moreover, the Punjab will be to me the equal in size and population of a great European country, a Spain or an Italy, and I shall appreciate the market it offers for English exports.7
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Robert D. Kaplan (The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate)
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In an effort to control their populations, both China and India adopted family planning programs in the 1970s. China created a one-child policy, and India turned to policies that included sterilization. In the 1960s and ’70s, population control was embraced in US foreign policy based on predictions that overpopulation would lead to mass famine and starvation and possibly to large-scale migration because of a lack of food. Earlier in the twentieth century, birth control advocates in the United States had also pressed their case, many of them hoping to help the poor avoid having unwanted children. Some of these advocates were eugenicists who wanted to eliminate “the unfit” and urged certain groups to have fewer children, or none at all. Sanger herself supported some eugenicist positions. Eugenics is morally nauseating, as well as discredited by science. Yet this history is being used to confuse the conversation on contraceptives today. Opponents of contraception try to discredit modern contraceptives by bringing up the history of eugenics, arguing that because contraceptives have been used for certain immoral purposes, they should not be used for any purpose, even allowing a mother to wait before having another child.
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Melinda French Gates (The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World)
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There are hundreds of examples of highly functioning commons around the world today. Some have been around for centuries, others have risen in response to economic and environmental crises, and still others have been inspired by the distributive bias of digital networks. From the seed-sharing commons of India to the Potato Park of Peru, indigenous populations have been maintaining their lands and managing biodiversity through a highly articulated set of rules about sharing and preservation. From informal rationing of parking spaces in Boston to Richard Stallman’s General Public License (GPL) for software, new commons are serving to reinstate the value of land and labor, as well as the ability of people to manage them better than markets can. In the 1990s, Elinor Ostrom, the American political scientist most responsible for reviving serious thought about commoning, studied what specifically makes a commons successful. She concluded that a commons must have an evolving set of rules about access and usage and that it must have a way of punishing transgressions. It must also respect the particular character of the resource being managed and the people who have worked with that resource the longest. Managing a fixed supply of minerals is different from managing a replenishing supply of timber. Finally, size and place matter. It’s easier for a town to manage its water supply than for the planet to establish water-sharing rules.78 In short, a commons must be bound by people, place, and rules. Contrary to prevailing wisdom, it’s not an anything-goes race to the bottom. It is simply a recognition of boundaries and limits. It’s pooled, multifaceted investment in pursuit of sustainable production. It is also an affront to the limitless expansion sought by pure capital. If anything, the notion of a commons’ becoming “enclosed” by privatization is a misnomer: privatizing a commons breaks the boundaries that protected its land and labor from pure market forces. For instance, the open-source seed-sharing networks of India promote biodiversity and fertilizer-free practices among farmers who can’t afford Western pesticides.79 They have sustained themselves over many generations by developing and adhering to a complex set of rules about how seed species are preserved, as well as how to mix crops on soil to recycle its nutrients over centuries of growing. Today, they are in battle with corporations claiming patents on these heirloom seeds and indigenous plants. So it’s not the seed commons that have been enclosed by the market at all; rather, the many-generations-old boundaries have been penetrated and dissolved by disingenuously argued free-market principles.
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Douglas Rushkoff (Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity)
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Sarjomdih, which for about sixty years was another nondescript dot on a map. That part of the Chhotanagpur area which is now formally known as the Purbi Singbhum district. Sarjomdih, where most of the population is Santhal and the rest are Munda; all of them are followers of Sarna, the aboriginal faith of the Chhotanagpur area. Saijomdih, which stands atop the mineral-rich core of the Indian subcontinent. Sarjomdih, outside whose southern frontiers a mine and a copper factory were established, where the Copper Town sprang up, and which was now gradually threatening to swallow all of Sarjomdih. Sarjomdih, which bore the repercussions of development, the nationalization of the mine and the factory, the opening up of two more quarries, and the confiscation of the villagers' properties so roads and living quarters could be built. Sarjomdih, whose men were given jobs as unskilled laborers in the mines and the factory in return for their fecund land. Sarjomdih, which is a standing testimony to the collapse of an agrarian Adivasi society and the dilution of Adivasi culture, the twin gifts of industrialization and progress. Sarjomdih, which within sixty years acquired all the signs of urbanity, just like the Copper Town: concrete houses; cable television; two-wheelers; a hand-pump; a narrow, winding tarmac that everyone called the 'main road'; and a primary school...
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Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar (The Adivasi Will Not Dance)
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With or without the Chinese, Calcutta was dead. Partition had deprived it of half its hinterland and burdened it with a vast dispirited refugee population. Even Nature had turned: the Hooghly was silting up. But Calcutta’s death was also of the heart. With its thin glitter, its filth and overpopulation, its tainted money, its exhaustion, it held the total Indian tragedy and the terrible British failure. Here the Indo-British encounter had at one time promised to be fruitful. Here the Indian renaissance had begun: so many of the great names of Indian reform are Bengali. But it was here, too, that the encounter had ended in mutual recoil. The cross-fertilization had not occurred, and Indian energy had turned sour. Once Bengal led India, in ideas and idealism; now, just forty years later, Calcutta, even to Indians, was a word of terror, conveying crowds, cholera and corruption. Its aesthetic impulses had not faded – there was an appealing sensibility in every Bengali souvenir, every over-exploited refugee ‘craft’ – but they, pathetically, threw into relief the greater decay. Calcutta had no leaders now, and apart from Ray, the film director, and Janah, the photographer, had no great names. It had withdrawn from the Indian experiment, as area after area of India was withdrawing, individual after individual. The British, who had built Calcutta, had ever been withdrawn from their creation; and they survived. Their business houses still flourished in Chownringhee; and to the Indians, products of the dead Indian renaissance, who now sat in some of the air-conditioned offices, Independence had meant no more than this: the opportunity to withdraw, British-like, from India. What then was the India that was left, for which one felt such concern? Was it no more than a word, an idea?
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V.S. Naipaul (The Indian Trilogy)
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HISTORICAL NOTE There are no nuclear power stations in Belarus. Of the functioning stations in the territory of the former USSR, the ones closest to Belarus are of the old Soviet-designed RBMK type. To the north, the Ignalinsk station, to the east, the Smolensk station, and to the south, Chernobyl. On April 26, 1986, at 1:23:58, a series of explosions destroyed the reactor in the building that housed Energy Block #4 of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station. The catastrophe at Chernobyl became the largest technological disaster of the twentieth century. For tiny Belarus (population: 10 million), it was a national disaster. During the Second World War, the Nazis destroyed 619 Belarussian villages along with their inhabitants. As a result of Chernobyl, the country lost 485 villages and settlements. Of these, 70 have been forever buried underground. During the war, one out of every four Belarussians was killed; today, one out of every five Belarussians lives on contaminated land. This amounts to 2.1 million people, of whom 700,000 are children. Among the demographic factors responsible for the depopulation of Belarus, radiation is number one. In the Gomel and Mogilev regions, which suffered the most from Chernobyl, mortality rates exceed birth rates by 20%. As a result of the accident, 50 million Ci of radionuclides were released into the atmosphere. Seventy percent of these descended on Belarus; fully 23% of its territory is contaminated by cesium-137 radionuclides with a density of over 1 Ci/km2. Ukraine on the other hand has 4.8% of its territory contaminated, and Russia, 0.5%. The area of arable land with a density of more than 1 Ci/km2 is over 18 million hectares; 2.4 thousand hectares have been taken out of the agricultural economy. Belarus is a land of forests. But 26% of all forests and a large part of all marshes near the rivers Pripyat, Dniepr, and Sozh are considered part of the radioactive zone. As a result of the perpetual presence of small doses of radiation, the number of people with cancer, mental retardation, neurological disorders, and genetic mutations increases with each year. —“Chernobyl.” Belaruskaya entsiklopedia On April 29, 1986, instruments recorded high levels of radiation in Poland, Germany, Austria, and Romania. On April 30, in Switzerland and northern Italy. On May 1 and 2, in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Great Britain, and northern Greece. On May 3, in Israel, Kuwait, and Turkey. . . . Gaseous airborne particles traveled around the globe: on May 2 they were registered in Japan, on May 5 in India, on May 5 and 6 in the U.S. and Canada. It took less than a week for Chernobyl to become a problem for the entire world. —“The Consequences of the Chernobyl Accident in Belarus.” Minsk, Sakharov International College on Radioecology The fourth reactor, now known as the Cover, still holds about twenty tons of nuclear fuel in its lead-and-metal core. No one knows what is happening with it. The sarcophagus was well made, uniquely constructed, and the design engineers from St. Petersburg should probably be proud. But it was constructed in absentia, the plates were put together with the aid of robots and helicopters, and as a result there are fissures. According to some figures, there are now over 200 square meters of spaces and cracks, and radioactive particles continue to escape through them . . . Might the sarcophagus collapse? No one can answer that question, since it’s still impossible to reach many of the connections and constructions in order to see if they’re sturdy. But everyone knows that if the Cover were to collapse, the consequences would be even more dire than they were in 1986. —Ogonyok magazine, No. 17, April 1996
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Svetlana Alexievich (Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster)
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In spring that year (1930), by a symbolic act whose significance I myself did not grasp, a march through the stifling heat to the sea with a little band of followers to make illegal salt, Gandhi had aroused the Indian people from the lethargy into which they had long sunk after nearly three centuries of British rule, if you counted the incredible period when they were governed for two hundred years not by a foreign country but by a bizarre band of traders greedy for profit, the honourable members and agents of the East India Company. These hustlers had first came out from England early in the seventeenth century, found the pickings beyond their fondest dreams, and by hook and by crook and by armed might, had stolen the country from the Indians.
It was the only instance in history, I believe, of a private commercial enterprise taking over a vast, heavily populated subcontinent, ruling it with an iron hand and exploiting it for private profit. Probably only the British, with their odd assortment of talents, their great entrepreneurial drive, their ingrained feeling of racial superiority, of which Rudyard Kipling would sing so shrilly, their guile in dividing the natives and turning them against one another, and their ruthlessness in putting down all who threatened their rule and their profits, could have done it, and got away with it so long.
Perhaps only the Indians, divided as they were after the decay of the Mughal Empire into dozens of quarrelling, warring states, great and small, could have succumbed so easily and so quickly to the aggression of a handful determined merchants, backed by a small handful of British troops in the service of the Company, and remained so long in abject subjection. As Radhakrishnan, the great Hindu philosopher, put it in our own time: "The day India lost her freedom, a great curse fell on her and she became petrified.
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William L. Shirer (Gandhi: A Memoir)
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When the victor, in a fight of the cities, according to the law of warfare, executes the whole male population and sells all the women and children into slavery, we see, in the sanction of such a law, that the Greek deemed it a positive necessity to allow his hatred to break forth unimpeded; in such moments the compressed and swollen feeling relieved itself; the tiger bounded forth, a voluptuous cruelty shone out of his fearful eye. Why had the Greek sculptor to represent again and again war and fights in innumerable repetitions, extended human bodies whose sinews are tightened through hatred or through the recklessness of triumph, fighters wounded and writhing with pain, or the dying with the last rattle in their throat? Why did the whole Greek world exult in the fighting scenes of the "Iliad"? I am afraid, we do not understand them enough in "Greek fashion," and that we should even shudder, if for once we did understand them thus.
But what lies, as the mother-womb of the Hellenic, behind the Homeric world? In the latter, by the extremely artistic definiteness, and the calm and purity of the lines we are already lifted far above the purely material amalgamation: its colours, by an artistic deception, appear lighter, milder, warmer; its men, in this coloured, warm illumination, appear better and more sympathetic — but where do we look, if, no longer guided and protected by Homer's hand, we step backwards into the pre-Homeric world?
Only into night and horror, into the products of a fancy accustomed to the horrible. What earthly existence is reflected in the loathsome-awful theogonian lore: a life swayed only by the children of the night, strife, amorous desires, deception, age and death. Let us imagine the suffocating atmosphere of Hesiod's poem, still thickened and darkened and without all the mitigations and purifications, which poured over Hellas from Delphi and the numerous seats of the gods! If we mix this thickened Boeotian air with the grim voluptuousness of the Etruscans, then such a reality would extort from us a world of myths within which Uranos, Kronos and Zeus and the struggles of the Titans would appear as a relief. Combat in this brooding atmosphere is salvation and safety; the cruelty of victory is the summit of life's glories.
And just as in truth the idea of Greek law has developed from murder and expiation of murder, so also nobler Civilisation takes her first wreath of victory from the altar of the expiation of murder. Behind that bloody age stretches a wave-furrow deep into Hellenic history. The names of Orpheus, of Musaeus, and their cults indicate to what consequences the uninterrupted sight of a world of warfare and cruelty led — to the loathing of existence, to the conception of this existence as a punishment to be borne to the end, to the belief in the identity of existence and indebtedness. But these particular conclusions are not specifically Hellenic; through them Greece comes into contact with India and the Orient generally. The Hellenic genius had ready yet another answer to the question: what does a life of fighting and of victory mean? and gives this answer in the whole breadth of Greek history.
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Friedrich Nietzsche (Homer and Classical Philology)
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the one hand, Kipling did not shy away from writing about the African American population in racist tones; on the other hand, he was amused by the aristocratic affectations and pretensions of southern plantation owners who did not think twice about practicing lynch justice. As the height of his contempt, Kipling compares the barbarism of this supposedly civilized America with that of India, about which he had published so many writings brimming with racist clichés, the very clichés that made him one of Victorian Britain’s most successful authors and most typical representatives. Anti
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Andrei S. Markovits (Uncouth Nation: Why Europe Dislikes America (The Public Square Book 5))
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During the past few years many nations have introduced population-control measures, enforced either by economic bribery (as in India, where the payment to a young man for undergoing an irreversible vasectomy is typically a quarter of a year's salary) or by social and governmental pressure (as in China, where early marriage is forbidden and where a third child is barred from receiving governmental welfare benefits).
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Gerard K. O'Neill (The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space)
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A person whose height-for-age is below two standard deviations less than the median for the reference population is described as ‘stunted’.
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Rukmini S. (Whole Numbers and Half Truths: What Data Can and Cannot Tell Us About Modern India)
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These nonlinear dynamics have a bookstore name, “chaos theory,” which is a misnomer because it has nothing to do with chaos. Chaos theory concerns itself primarily with functions in which a small input can lead to a disproportionate response. Population models, for instance, can lead to a path of explosive growth, or extinction of a species, depending on a very small difference in the population at a starting point in time. Another popular scientific analogy is the weather, where it has been shown that a simple butterfly fluttering its wings in India can cause a hurricane in New York.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets (Incerto Book 1))
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The Mandal Commission (1980) calculated that 52 per cent of the population—including non-Hindus—constitute ‘Other Backward Castes’.
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Ghanshyam Shah (Social Movements in India: A Review of Literature)
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China followed this approach by enrolling all population into a thin catastrophic coverage and then expanding the benefits to an outpatient package as more money became available.25
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Amitabh Kant (The Path Ahead: Transformative Ideas for India)
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population awareness and behavioural nudges to mitigate the distorted preferences.
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Amitabh Kant (The Path Ahead: Transformative Ideas for India)
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The British in India were never more than 0.05 per cent of the population. The Empire, in Hobsbawm’s evocative words, was ‘so easily won, so narrowly based, so absurdly easily ruled thanks to the devotion of a few and the passivity of the many.
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Shashi Tharoor (An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India)
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Pakistan is an Islamic state with a history of dictatorship and populations whose loyalty is often more to their cultural region than to the state. Islam, cricket, the intelligence services, the military and fear of India are what hold Pakistan together. None of these will be enough to prevent it from being pulled apart if the forces of separatism grow stronger. In effect Pakistan has been in a state of civil war for more than a decade, following periodic and ill-judged wars with its giant neighbour India.
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Tim Marshall (Prisoners of Geography)
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This could be because in the geography of origin of decolonial thought, namely the Americas, colonised societies have become almost entirely Christian. In other words, the preoccupation of decolonial scholarship with race and its reluctance to address religion with the same degree of candour may be attributed to the fact that the regions that have produced much of the scholarship on coloniality so far, follow the religion of the coloniser, namely Christianity. Their demographic reality, perhaps, offers an explanation as to their gaze being more alive to race than to religion, since reclaiming their indigenous religious identities may seem impossible despite having embarked on their decolonial journeys. Given the huge Christian settler colonial populations in the Americas in particular, the numbers may not even be conducive for indigenous peoples even if they wanted to revert to the faith of their ancestors. And if this were not enough, pragmatic considerations, such as the highly organised and evangelical nature of Christianity and its status as a global majority, have a direct and real bearing on the ability of any erstwhile non-Christian colonised society to reclaim and return to its roots.
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J. Sai Deepak (India that is Bharat: Coloniality, Civilisation, Constitution)
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Index: Pew Religious Restrictions12
Monitors: Levels of social hostility and religious restrictions
Method: Rating
India 2014 rating
Social hostility: 9.0
Religious restrictions: 5.0
India 2020 rating
Social hostility: 9.6
Religious restrictions: 5.9
Result: India fell by 0.6 in social hostility and by 0.9 points in
religious restrictions.
Reasons cited: India was in the top 10 in each of the following
categories:
Countries with high levels of social hostilities related to
religious norms
Countries with high levels of inter-religious tension and
violence
Countries with high levels of religious violence by organised
groups
Countries with high levels of individual and social group
harassment
‘Among twenty-five most populous countries, Egypt, India,
Russia, Pakistan and Indonesia had the highest overall levels of both
government restrictions and social hostilities involving religion.
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Aakar Patel (Price of the Modi Years)
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Interestingly, the lion plays an important role in the Mahavamsa, a Pali epic, that is the foundation myth of the Sinhalese people of Sri Lanka. According to the Mahavamsa, the Sinhalese people are the descendants of Prince Vijaya and his followers who sailed down to Sri Lanka in the sixth century BC from what is now Orissa and West Bengal. The story tells us that Prince Vijaya was the son of a lion and a human princess, which is why the majority population of Sri Lanka call themselves the Sinhala—or the lion people—and the country’s national flag features a stylized lion holding a sword. Equally significant is the fact that the Tamil rebels of northern Sri Lanka chose to call themselves the ‘Tigers’. The ancient rivalry between the two big cats remains embedded in cultural memory even as the animals themselves face extinction.
Excerpt From: Sanjeev Sanyal. “Land of the Seven Rivers A Brief History of India's Geography”. Apple Books.
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Sanjeev Sanyal (Land of the Seven Rivers: A Brief History of India's Geography)
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Under Narendra Modi, the rich have become richer, and inequalities have increased. A 2018 Oxfam report revealed that 10 percent of the richest Indians garnered 77.4 percent of the nation’s wealth (against 73 percent the year before)119 and that 58 percent of it was in the hands of India’s “1 percent” (while the world average is 50 percent). The earnings made by this handful of people in 2017 were equal to India’s budget for that year. Also in 2017, the fortune of India’s 100 richest tycoons leaped by 26 percent. The richest of them all, Mukesh Ambani, increased his wealth by 67 percent, according to Forbes India120—a publication, moreover, that belongs to this billionaire. Ambani’s fortune again rose by 24 percent in 2018.121 Going slightly beyond the 100 richest, the IIFL Wealth Hurun India Rich List identified the 953 richest Indian families and gave figures showing that their fortune represented more than 26 percent of the country’s GDP122—which meant that if a tax rate of 4 percent was applied to the nation’s 953 richest families, it would give the government the equivalent of 1 percent of India’s GDP.123 According to Crédit Suisse, the number of dollar millionaires in India jumped from 34,000 in 2000 to 759,000 in 2019,124 which means that the country has one of “the world’s fastest-growing population of millionaires.”125 The average wealth level of these millionaires increased by 74 percent over this period.
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Christophe Jaffrelot (Modi's India: Hindu Nationalism and the Rise of Ethnic Democracy)
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While the rich became richer, the taxation policy of the government, instead of correcting this trend, actively strengthened it. One of the first decisions of the first Modi government was to abolish the wealth tax that had been introduced in 1957. While the fiscal resources generated by this tax were never significant, the decision was more than a symbolic one.126 The wealth tax was replaced with an income tax increase of 2 percent for households that earned more than Rs 10 million (133,333 USD) annually.127 Few people pay income tax in India anyway: only 14.6 million people (2 percent of the population) did in 2019. As a result, the income-tax-to-GDP ratio remained below 11 percent. Not only has the Modi government not tried to introduce any reforms to change this, but it has instead increased indirect taxes (such as excise taxes), which are the most unfair as they affect everyone, irrespective of income. Taxes on alcohol and petroleum products are a case in point. As some state governments have also imposed their own taxes, this strategy means that India has one of the highest taxation rates on fuel in the world. The share of indirect taxes in the state’s fiscal resources has increased under the Modi government to reach 50 percent of the total taxes—compared to 39 percent under UPA I and 44 percent under UPA II.128 Modi’s taxation policy, a supply-side economics approach, is in keeping with the managerial rhetoric of promoting the spirit of enterprise that the prime minister, who readily presents himself as an efficiency-conscious “apolitical CEO,” relishes. One of the neoliberal measures the Modi government enacted in the name of economic rationality, right from his very first budget in 2015, was to lower the corporate tax.129 For existing companies it was reduced from 30 to 22 percent, and for manufacturing firms incorporated after October 1, 2019 that started operations before March 31, 2023, it was reduced from 25 to 15 percent—the biggest reduction in twenty-eight years. In addition to these tax reductions, the government withdrew the enhanced surcharge on long- and short-term capital gains for foreign portfolio investors as well as domestic portfolio investors.130
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Christophe Jaffrelot (Modi's India: Hindu Nationalism and the Rise of Ethnic Democracy)
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absolute numbers were highest in India (18.5 million deaths) and China (between 4.0 and 9.5 million), but death rates varied widely from place to place. Close to half (44.5 percent) of the population of Cameroon was wiped out; in Western Samoa, nearly a quarter (23.6 percent). In Kenya and Fiji, more than 5 percent of the people died. The other sub-Saharan countries for which we have data suffered mortality of between 2.4 percent (Nigeria) and 4.4 percent (South Africa). In Central America, mortality was also high: 3.9 percent of the population of Guatemala, 2 percent of all Mexicans. Indonesia also had a high death rate (3 percent). The worst mortality rates in Europe were in Hungary and Spain (each around 1.2 percent), with Italy not far behind. By contrast, North America got off lightly: between 0.53 and 0.65 percent for the United States, 0.61 percent for Canada.
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Niall Ferguson (Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe)
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We have increased our population to the level of 7 billion and beyond. We are well on our way toward 9 billion before our growth trend is likely to flatten. We live at high densities in many cities. We have penetrated, and we continue to penetrate, the last great forests and other wild ecosystems of the planet, disrupting the physical structures and the ecological communities of such places. We cut our way through the Congo. We cut our way through the Amazon. We cut our way through Borneo. We cut our way through Madagascar. We cut our way through New Guinea and northeastern Australia. We shake the trees, figuratively and literally, and things fall out. We kill and butcher and eat many of the wild animals found there. We settle in those places, creating villages, work camps, towns, extractive industries, new cities. We bring in our domesticated animals, replacing the wild herbivores with livestock. We multiply our livestock as we've multiplied ourselves, operating huge factory-scale operations involving thousands of cattle, pigs, chickens, ducks, sheep, and goats, not to mention hundreds of bamboo rats and palm civets, all confined en masse within pens and corrals, under conditions that allow those domestics and semidomestics to acquire infectious pathogens from external sources (such as bats roosting over the pig pens), to share those infections with one another, and to provide abundant opportunities for the pathogens to evolve new forms, some of which are capable of infecting a human as well as a cow or a duck. We treat many of those stock animals with prophylactic doses of antibiotics and other drugs, intended not to cure them but to foster their weight gain and maintain their health just sufficiently for profitable sale and slaughter, and in doing that we encourage the evolution of resistant bacteria. We export and import livestock across great distances and at high speeds. We export and import other live animals, especially primates, for medical research. We export and import wild animals as exotic pets. We export and import animal skins, contraband bushmeat, and plants, some of which carry secret microbial passengers. We travel, moving between cities and continents even more quickly than our transported livestock. We stay in hotels where strangers sneeze and vomit. We eat in restaurants where the cook may have butchered a porcupine before working on our scallops. We visit monkey temples in Asia, live markets in India, picturesque villages in South America, dusty archeological sites in New Mexico, dairy towns in the Netherlands, bat caves in East Africa, racetracks in Australia – breathing the air, feeding the animals, touching things, shaking hands with the friendly locals – and then we jump on our planes and fly home. We get bitten by mosquitoes and ticks. We alter the global climate with our carbon emissions, which may in turn alter the latitudinal ranges within which those mosquitoes and ticks live. We provide an irresistible opportunity for enterprising microbes by the ubiquity and abundance of our human bodies.
Everything I’ve just mentioned is encompassed within this rubric: the ecology and evolutionary biology of zoonotic diseases. Ecological circumstance provides opportunity for spillover. Evolution seizes opportunity, explores possibilities, and helps convert spillovers to pandemics.
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David Quammen (Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic)
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Here Tipu was laid to rest next to his father, ‘immediately consecrated by his Mahomedan followers as a Shahid, or Martyr of the Faith … with the full military honours due to his exalted rank’.58 The British, all of whom had during the campaign been force-fed on Wellesley’s propaganda that Tipu was a brutal tyrant, were surprised to discover how much his people, both Hindu and Muslim, clearly loved him, just as they had been surprised to see how prosperous his kingdom was – ‘well-cultivated, populous with industrious inhabitants,
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William Dalrymple (The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company)
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This would give India the commanding heights of the Tibetan Plateau and a base from which to push into the Chinese heartland, as well as control of the Tibetan sources of three of China’s great rivers, the Yellow, Yangtze and Mekong, which is why Tibet is known as ‘China’s Water Tower’. China, a country with approximately the same volume of water usage as the USA, but with a population five times as large, will clearly not allow that.
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Tim Marshall (Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics)
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N.C. Chatterjee, one of Savarkar’s close colleagues in the Mahasabha, vented his frustration in a letter to Moonje: The entire Hindu population is with Gandhiji and his movement and if anybody wants to oppose it, he will be absolutely finished and hounded out of public life. The unfortunate statement of Veer Savarkar [opposing Quit India] made our position rather difficult in Bengal. It is rather amusing to find that Mr. Jinnah wants the Mussalmans not to join the Congress movement and Mr. Savarkar wants the Hindus not to join the same. Even when the Congress movement has made a great stir and it shows that it has got thousands of adherents.
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Vikram Sampath (Savarkar: A Contested Legacy, 1924-1966)
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When Columbus landed, Cook and Borah concluded, the central Mexican plateau alone had a population of 25.2 million. By contrast, Spain and Portugal together had fewer than ten million inhabitants. Central Mexico, they said, was the most densely populated place on earth, with more than twice as many people per square mile than China or India.
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Charles C. Mann (1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus)
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AUTHOR'S INTRODUCTION: More than twenty-five years ago while researching the fourth Saint-Germain book, Path of the Eclipse, I ran across references to the Year of the Yellow Snow, sometimes called the Year of the Dark Sun, in Western reckoning A.D. 535-36, which was characterized by catastrophic drops in temperature, crop failures, and famine throughout Asia and Europe, with disruption of trade and movements of populations resulting from these losses—just the sort of event to set the speculative juices, flowing, but not the object of my research, nor the period with which I was dealing, promising though it appeared. Then, about ten years ago, other researchers did some serious scholarship on those disastrous events and tried to determine the cause of what turned out to be a worldwide famine and, after considering a number of different scenarios from meteor collisions to a mini-ice age—which indeed occurred—at last identified the probable source of the trouble as an eruption of that all-time bad-boy volcano, Krakatoa; this eruption was more overwhelming than many of its others, for, according to records in Indonesia, this eruption broke Sumatra off from Java—Krakatoa is at the hinge position of those two islands—and opened the Sundra Strait to a deep-water sea passage instead of only the shallowest-draft boats, which it had been for centuries. The eruption occurred in late February or early March of A.D. 535, and its explosion was heard all the way to Beijing. It had been heralded by many months of regional instability, earthquakes, and drastic variations in ocean temperatures in and around what was becoming the Sundra Strait, making the shipping lanes more treacherous than they had been in the past. Many ships' captains reported dangerous sailing in and around Indonesia, and over time, merchant ships avoided the region. ¶ In April, following the eruption, the ash from the volcano had spread all around the world, and disaster followed after it, impacting global weather patterns and lowering the average temperatures sufficiently to keep crops from growing in most of Asia and Europe, as well as large portions of Africa and Americas. Although every part of the world was affected, there were regions that bore more of the brunt of the tragedy than others. Many of the nomadic people of the Central Asian Steppes were driven out of their traditional grazing lands when their herds began to die because of lack of food as the grasslands became arid plains, and their struggle to find new pastureland was made much more difficult by the impact of the colder weather; the significant westward migration from Central Asia began as an attempt to find grass for their herds. In China and Tibet, the snow that continued to fall all the way into June and July was yellow due to the high levels of sulfur in the upper atmosphere. Closer to the eruption site, actual flakes of sulfur fell from the sky, burning people, animals, and fields alike and contaminating wells, springs, and rivers; the devastation of the Indonesian Islands was calamitous, with tens of thousands of people killed in tsunamis spawned by the eruption, by gaseous emanations, and by sulfur contamination, records of which still exist in the royal archives of the Srivijava Empire, which comprised most of modern Indonesia. For months afterward, the remains of humans, animals, trees, sea-life, and buildings washed up on the shores of what are now Indonesia, the Malay Peninsula, the Philippines, China, and India.
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Chelsea Quinn Yarbro (Dark of the Sun (Saint-Germain, #17))
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The British in India were never more than 0.05 per cent of the population.
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Shashi Tharoor (Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India)
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India and rest of the world has already taken the sustainable development concept, here two important key problems are context specific solutions and unity in diversity. As world has become one, hereafter no one can stop any foreign visitors, investments or anything that happens within nation. But due to pollution an over population everywhere is succumbed. To reduce population china took one child policy but failed due to lack of genetic diversity and male - femaela ratio and also working population. to meet this problem key solution only sustainable development that touches all scienctific and technological aspects. No technical advancements ahold be stopped but they have to regulated into eco friendly aspects. Industries should evolve into eco friendly and sustainable solutions and also banking sector. They should and should and should minimize pollution at any cost otherwise this chaos will continue and will lead disintegration of society and may also lead to civil war in future. so billionaires should consider humans ans humans just like them not as robots. So try to reach SDGs and policies for any industries that pollutes the environment. And once population is getting stabilized by 2030 as predicted by UN, if it stabilized then obviously fine and if it is not stabilized then it ie better to dismiss the concept of marriage and run into future with science.
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Ganapathy K
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Anxious to let my features show': Asian American woman shares fear of harassment - CNN - YouTube channel - Comment for this video with broader perspective, Part 2 - India was once perfect culture, our food habits were perfect, whatever we need vitamins, nutrients, carbs, fats everything we tend to obtain from plants and only plants, some yogi(No one) can even live with sun light and water or even neem air, but this 100% traditionality in India or siddha become almost obsolete because of pollution and over population and also spiritual reasons because many people are already trapped in Karmic cycle, which is why They can not even think of escaping it, if they try to escape they will die, and whomever has the solutions for this are mostly disregarded (Like , ok myself, Saddguru, Sarnam Singh, Somnath Bandyopadyay, Prabhakar Sharma, Ritika Rajput, Shalini Chouhan, they are disregarded because they are north Indians or yogis that speaks lie - this is what most people think, that is why I also being modern and eat evrything and talk everything and do everything so that you will not hate me, If I choose to be 100% traditional which I can, then whomever surrounding me will not survive, If I choose 100 % traditionality, rain will engulf the earth and sun will disappear for years, that is why I choose mixed mode of life with all ideas are considered,
Try to respect traditionality at least a little, there is a Tamil proverb, மாதம் மும்மாரி பொழிந்து செழித்த பூமி, which means 3 times rain per month and natural agriculture prospered and people life prospered - This proverb is from ancient Tamil Land, As Kali or Kaali yuga started everyone chose modernity, but try to respect traditionality at least a little to protect this land, you no need to go to temple, you no need to pray god, just protect soil, agriculture and traditional science like planting trees and all, then slowly nature will dominate the earth and even in this Kali or Kaali yuga there will be prosperity for next 5000 years,
Because in Kali or Kaali yuga first 10000 (Only 5000 years in Kali or Kaali yuga has passed so far) years are golden period, do not rush this golden period in to hell within 100 years.,
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Ganapathy K Siddharth Vijayaraghavan
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Numerous sites have been found outside the core area, including some as far east as Uttar Pradesh and as far west as Sutkagen-dor on the Makran coast of Baluchistan, not far from Iran. There is even a site in Central Asia called Shortughai along the Amu Darya, close to the Afghan-Tajik border. Thus, the geographical spread, the number of sites and implied population of the Harappan civilization dwarfs that of contemporary Egypt, China or Mesopotamia. What the Harappans lack in grand buildings, they make up for in the sheer scale of their civilizational reach and in the extraordinary municipal sophistication of their cities.
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Sanjeev Sanyal (Land of seven rivers: History of India's Geography)
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It may not be an accident that many of the winners of globalization were ex-communist countries that had invested heavily in the human capital of their populations in the communist years (China, Vietnam) or countries threatened with communism that had pursued similar policies for that reason (Taiwan, South Korea). The best bet, therefore, for a country like India is to attempt to do things that can make the quality of life better for its citizens with the resources it already has: improving education, health, and the functioning of the courts and the banks, and building better infrastructure (better roads and more livable cities, for example).
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Abhijit V. Banerjee (Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems)
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In the 1830s the British East India Company grew and processed the drug (Opium) in eastern India. Foreign traders with China buying tea, silk and porcelain were obliged to pay in silver so a trade imbalance grew. The traders wanted a product they could sell back to China.
One answer was opium. There were soon one million addicts of a population 400 million and when the Chinese government tried to ban opium’s importation, officials were bribed and even more opium was smuggled in. ...Britain produced the drug (Opium) as a government monopoly and fought two wars to stop China from banning its import.
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Jenny Sew Hoy Agnew (Merchant, Miner, Mandarin: The life and times of the remarkable Choie Sew Hoy)
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The fire burned on, and the next doubling of our population would take only 200 years from 1700-1900. There would be one and a half billion humans at the end of it, all but half a percent belonging to our culture, East and West. It would be a period in which, for the first time, religious prophets would attract followers simply by predicting the imminent end of the world: in which Australis, New Guinea, India…would be claimed or carved up by the major powers of Europe; in which indigenous people all around the world would be wiped out in the millions by diseases brought to them by Europeans.
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Daniel Quinn (The Story of B (Ishmael, #2))
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This brings us to Tibet and its importance to China. The Himalayas run the length of the Chinese–Indian border before descending to become the Karakorum Range bordering Pakistan, Afghanistan and Tajikistan. This is nature’s version of a Great Wall of China, or – looking at it from New Delhi’s side – the Great Wall of India. It cuts the two most populous countries on the planet off from each other both militarily and economically.
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Tim Marshall (Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics)
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I’D NEVER BEEN to India before, but the country had always held a special place in my imagination. Maybe it was its sheer size, with one-sixth of the world’s population, an estimated two thousand distinct ethnic groups, and more than seven hundred languages spoken. Maybe it was because I’d spent a part of my childhood in Indonesia listening to the epic Hindu tales of the Ramayana and the Mahābhārata, or because of my interest in Eastern religions, or because of a group of Pakistani and Indian college friends who’d taught to me to cook dahl and keema and turned me on to Bollywood movies.
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Barack Obama (A Promised Land)
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Although India had fared better than many other countries in the wake of the financial crisis, the global slowdown would inevitably make it harder to generate jobs for India’s young and rapidly growing population. Then there was the problem of Pakistan: Its continuing failure to work with India to investigate the 2008 terrorist attacks on hotels and other sites in Mumbai had significantly increased tensions between the two countries, in part because Lashkar-e-Tayyiba, the terrorist organization responsible, was believed to have links to Pakistan’s intelligence service. Singh had resisted calls to retaliate against Pakistan after the attacks, but his restraint had cost him politically. He feared that rising anti-Muslim sentiment had strengthened the influence of India’s main opposition party, the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
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Barack Obama (A Promised Land)
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In the West, Hinduism is a religion that everyone has heard of but one that few non-practitioners truly understand. Today it is widely regarded as one of the world’s great religions and considered the indigenous religion of India, with practices and beliefs stretching back thousands of years. However, many of these so-called facts are actually erroneous. Hinduism as it is conceived of today is a conglomerate of a number of indigenous Indian religions; in fact, prior to the migration of Islam and the corporate invasion of the British, Hinduism may not have existed at all. Rather, a number of local religious traditions had very old belief systems dating back hundreds or thousands of years, depending on the tradition, and many worshiped gods that are no longer worshiped today. In essence, it was only through the non-indigenous populations in India, namely the Turks and later the British, who defined what Hinduism was.
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Charles River Editors (Krishna: The History and Legacy of the Popular Hindu Deity)
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The Federal Republic of Germany has been willing to acknowledge the crimes of its predecessor; but in east Prussia, the Red Army, in its revenge, destroyed a society fully as old and as rooted in the European experience as the Jewish society of eastern Europe. Thereafter between twelve and fifteen million ethnic Germans were expelled from their homes, properties, and the lives they had known, and over the course of the two years between 1945 and 1947, sent into exile in the withered German state in which they had never lived and to which they were bound only by the decayed tie of the German language.8 Yet the expulsion of the ethnic Germans from eastern and central Europe bears comparison to the partition of India and dwarfs completely all population expulsions in the Middle East.9
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David Berlinski (Human Nature)
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In 2018, there were 867 cars for every thousand people in the United States, 520 in the European Union. Compare that to the 339 in Russia, the 208 in Brazil, the 160 in China—and just 37 in India. In other words, the world’s auto population will grow substantially as incomes rise and the number of people increases from today’s 7.8 billion to 9.5 or 10 billion. In “Rivalry,” IHS Markit’s planning scenario, the world’s auto fleet grows from its current level of just over 1.4 billion to over 2 billion by 2050. Of that 2 billion, about 610 million are electric vehicles—almost a third of the total. The fleet simply does not turn over quickly. Annual new-car sales represent only about 6–7 percent of the total fleet. Most of the fleet is composed of vehicles that have been purchased over the preceding dozen years—in the United States, cars on average remain on the road for 11.8 years. But EVs catch up. By 2050, in this scenario, some 51 percent of total new car sales are EVs.
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Daniel Yergin (The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations)
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India has struggled with the inadequacy of modern energy for a long time. Noncommercial energy commonly known as “biomass”—wood and agricultural and animal waste—has been the fuel for more than half of India’s population. In terms of commercial energy, India depends on coal for over half of its total energy, and almost 75 percent of electricity.
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Daniel Yergin (The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations)
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In 2018, there were 867 cars for every thousand people in the United States, 520 in the European Union. Compare that to the 339 in Russia, the 208 in Brazil, the 160 in China—and just 37 in India. In other words, the world’s auto population will grow substantially as incomes rise and the number of people increases from today’s 7.8 billion to 9.5 or 10 billion.
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Daniel Yergin (The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations)
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Dominated by Hindus for two centuries, Karachi became a Muslim and a muhajir city in a matter of months. Sindhis – Hindu and Muslim – were reduced to less than 10 per cent of the city’s population.
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Nandita Bhavnani (THE MAKING OF EXILE: SINDHI HINDUS AND THE PARTITION OF INDIA)
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Ambedkar envisaged Partition as a complete territorial separation of Hindus and Muslims, implying an exchange of population between truncated India and Pakistan. He had worked this out in detail, with blueprints for the transfer of pension rights and property rights. It is quite likely that the implementation of his plan for an orderly division, with an orderly exchange of population, would have saved hundreds of thousands of lives. By contrast, Gandhi’s and Nehru’s refusal of this exchange, effectively sacrificing the Hindus in Pakistan to the dogma of Hindu-Muslim unity, made them responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people.
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Koenraad Elst (Why I Killed the Mahatma: Understanding Godse's Defence)
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History shows that epidemics have been the great resetter of countries’ economy and social fabric. Why should it be different with COVID-19? A seminal paper on the long-term economic consequences of major pandemics throughout history shows that significant macroeconomic after-effects can persist for as long as 40 years, substantially depressing real rates of return.[18] This is in contrast to wars that have the opposite effect: they destroy capital while pandemics do not – wars trigger higher real interest rates, implying greater economic activity, while pandemics trigger lower real rates, implying sluggish economic activity. In addition, consumers tend to react to the shock by increasing their savings, either because of new precautionary concerns, or simply to replace the wealth lost during the epidemic. On the labour side, there will be gains at the expense of capital since real wages tend to rise after pandemics. As far back as the Black Death that ravaged Europe from 1347 to 1351 (and that suppressed 40% of Europe’s population in just a few years), workers discovered for the first time in their life that the power to change things was in their hands. Barely a year after the epidemic had subsided, textile workers in Saint-Omer (a small city in northern France) demanded and received successive wage rises. Two years later, many workers’ guilds negotiated shorter hours and higher pay, sometimes as much as a third more than their pre-plague level. Similar but less extreme examples of other pandemics point to the same conclusion: labour gains in power to the detriment of capital. Nowadays, this phenomenon may be exacerbated by the ageing of much of the population around the world (Africa and India are notable exceptions), but such a scenario today risks being radically altered by the rise of automation,
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Klaus Schwab (COVID-19: The Great Reset)
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Mass population movements, natural disasters, wars and the threat of global pandemics still have the potential to diminish human progress. Ultimately,
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Raoul McLaughlin (The Roman Empire and the Indian Ocean: The Ancient World Economy & the Kingdoms of Africa, Arabia & India)
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Investment firms are buying up more vacation homes, aiming to cash in on growing demand from tourists and remote workers.
Most vacation rental homes are owned by small-time owners who list their properties on websites such as Airbnb Inc., but the number of financial firms investing in the sector is growing.
New York-based investment firm Saluda Grade is launching a venture with short-term- rental operator AvantStay Inc. to buy about $500 million of homes, the companies said Tuesday. Saluda Grade said it is also looking to raise debt by selling mortgage bonds backed by its homes to investors, the first vacation-rental mortgage securitization, according to the company.
Andes STR, a startup that buys and manages short-term rental homes on behalf of investors, also recently signed a deal with Chilean investment firm WEG Capital to buy roughly $80 million of properties in the U.S., Andes said. These investors are betting they can get higher returns if they rent out homes by the night instead of by the year.
Low-interest rates have made it more attractive to borrow and Buy Traditional Rental Homes, inflating property prices and making it harder for new buyers to turn a profit. That has prompted some institutions and wealthy families to look in more obscure corners of the property market where competition is smaller, investment advisers say.
Some are turning to investments in vacation homes, where demand has surged in many places during the pandemic as more people choose to work from remote locations and leisure travel heated up last year.
“There’s a lot more yield available in the short-term market,” said Saluda Grade’s chief executive, Ryan Craft. It is the latest sign of how the pandemic is changing the way people work and live, and how real-estate investors are angling to find new ways to profit from these shifts.
Saluda Grade is targeting homes within driving distance of major population centers, Mr. Craft said. His company will buy the homes and AvantStay will manage them for a fee.
But while vacation-rental homes can offer higher returns, they also pose challenges to investors. Mortgages are usually more expensive and harder to get for short-term rentals than for owner-occupied homes, said Giri Devanur, CEO of reAlpha Tech Corp., a startup that wants to pool money from small-time investors to buy short-term-rental homes.
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That Vacation Home Listed on Airbnb Might Be Owned by Wall Street
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Russia is the biggest country in the world, twice the size of the USA or China, five times the size of India, seventy times the size of the UK. However, it has a relatively small population of about 144 million, fewer people than Nigeria or Pakistan. Its agricultural growing season is short and it struggles to adequately distribute what is grown around the eleven time zones which Moscow governs.
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Tim Marshall (Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics)
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COVID-19 self-isolation in India is not easy – pushing people to self-isolate on trees, due to lack of space. The population density in India is 464 per km2 (1,202 people per sq. mi).
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Nayden Kostov (323 Disturbing Facts about Our World)
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That Shiksha Satyagrah is extremely important in today’s day and time because India among most populated countries and still it is considered a developing nation. This is because of a lack of quality in education. Even after so many years of freedom, there is a need for campaigns like ‘Beti Bachao, Beti padhao’, female feticide, and many more, and this majorly because the education system is still the same. Everything else is being focused on except education.
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Sarita Rai
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If the theory of the balance of power has any applicability at all, it is to the politics of the first period, that pre-industrial, `dynastic` period when nations were kings and politics a sport, when there were many nations of roughly equivalent power, and when nations could and did increase their power largely through clever diplomacy, alliance and military adventures.
The theories of this book, and the theory of the power transition in particular, apply to the second period, when the major determinant of national power are population size, political organization, and industrial strength, and when shifts in power through internal development are consequently of great importance. Differential industrialization is the key to understanding the shifts in power in the 19th and 20th centuries, but it was not the key in the years before 1750 or so and it will not always be the key in the future.
Period 3 will require new theories. We cannot predict yet what they will be, for we cannon predict what the world will be like after all the nations are industrialized. Indeed, we may not have nations at all. By projecting current trends we can make guessed about the near future, but we cannon see very far ahead. What will the world be like when China and India are two major powers, as it seems likely they will be? (1958 n.n.)...
We are all bound by our own culture and our own experience, social scientists no less than other men... Social theories may be adequate for their day, but as time passes, they require revision. One of the most serious criticisms that can be made of the balance of power theory is that it has not been revised. Concepts and hypotheses applicable to the 16th century and to the politics of such units as the Italian city states have been taken and applied, without major revision, to the international politics of the twentieth-century nations such as the United States, England, and the Soviet Union. (p. 307)
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A.F.K. Organski (World Politics)
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Addiction among its southern population was a serious and growing social problem for the Qing dynasty. Although the Portuguese had been the main suppliers, the trafficking burgeoned when Britain’s East India Company entered the business. The East India Company, a privately capitalised firm but operating with the full mandate and
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Peter Hartcher (Red Zone: China's Challenge and Australia's Future)
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Theodore W. Allen has explained that the distinction between racial and national oppression turns on the composition of the group that enforces elite rule: under a system of national oppression, such as Britain imposed on India or the United States maintains in Puerto Rico, the conquering power implements its dominance by incorporating sections of the elite classes of the subject population (in modern times a portion of the bourgeoisie and state bureaucracy) into the ruling apparatus. Under the system of racial oppression, elite rule rests on the support of the laboring classes of the oppressor group.
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Noel Ignatiev (How the Irish Became White)
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Before the Second World War, the British paid ample lip service to the idea of self-government in India, but granting full independence was never a serious option. The Raj was the jewel in His Majesty’s crown; giving it up was unthinkable. But by 1947, the British nation was exhausted and traumatized by German bombing; discouraged by the loss of so many of its soldiers; shocked by the desertion and mutiny of its Indian servicemen; benumbed by unprecedented winter cold and an energy shortage that had the population shivering and its factories shuttered; broke, owing not only the Americans for the money that was keeping its economy afloat but India, too; and disgusted by the growing violence between Muslims, Hindus, and Sikhs for which it took no responsibility, violence that would shortly lead to a bloodbath of historic proportions. Overwhelmed by these troubles at home and in its disintegrating colony, Britain concluded that exit from the subcontinent was the only option.
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Ayad Akhtar (Homeland Elegies)
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In c. 1700 BC, another group of Indie speakers settled in south Afghanistan and took to the composition of the Ṛgvedic hymns in the region between the Helmand and the Arghandab. We have shown that the description of Sarasvatī and Sarayu in the Ṛgveda, and even sūtra literature, fits the Afghan rivers Helmand and Hari-rud better than any river in India. In c. 1400 BC, the Ṛgvedic people moved eastwards to the middle Indus. Eventually, they absorbed the Cemetery H people to found the Painted Grey Ware culture in c. 850 BC in Punjab and on the upper Ghaggar. The Vedic people remained to the west of the Yamuna-Ganga doab until c. 850 BC. The large-scale settlement of the Ganga Plain took place only when the use of iron became widespread and, perhaps, when population increased. During their migrations, the Indo-Aryans carried with them not only their poetry and religious beliefs, but also place and river names which they selectively reused. (Table 15)
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Rajesh Kochhar (The Vedic People: Their History and Geography)
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India has a population greater than Europe and North America combined. It's land area exceeds France, Germany, Great Britain, Iraq, Japan, Paraguay, and Ghana put together, and its citizens are that similar. They get along as well as everybody at the UN does....To all this, the Bharatiya Janata Party responds with a slogan: 'ONE NATION, ONE PEOPLE, ONE CULTURE'.
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P.J. O'Rourke
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The first Muslim invasion was as early as the eighth century CE, when the Arabs of the Umayyad Caliphate made it as far as the Punjab in what is now Pakistan. From then until the eighteenth century various foreign invasions brought Islam to the subcontinent; however, east of the Indus River Valley a majority of the Hindu population resisted conversion, thus sowing the seeds for the eventual partition of India.
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Tim Marshall (Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics)
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India has skipped past industrial development, to become a software giant, a knowledge economy in which one third of the population is illiterate.
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Raj Patel (Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System - Revised and Updated)
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Despite all the efforts in China to manage congestion, owning a car continues to be a powerful aspiration. And then there is the other giant—India. There are only 48 million cars in India compared to China’s 240 million, despite similarly sized populations. But India is also a very big emerging market, and the share of young people in India’s population is much greater than in China’s, and its road system is far less developed. But economic growth will raise incomes and finance new infrastructure, and India’s massive cohort of young people will end up having a huge impact on the global auto and oil industries.
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Daniel Yergin (The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations)
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At the height of the first oil boom in 1980, there were nearly 10,000 Saudi students in the United States. After 9/11, there were barely 2,000. In 2017, because of King Abdullah’s scholarship program, there were 68,000 Saudis studying at hundreds of American universities and thousands of others in Britain, Canada, and Australia. Only China, India, and South Korea had more students in American universities, and when measured as a percentage of its total population, Saudi Arabia was far ahead of the others.
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David Rundell (Vision or Mirage: Saudi Arabia at the Crossroads)
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People are often surprised to hear that Romani is in fact a fully fledged language just like any other, that it has its origins in India, that it is related to Sanskrit, an ancient language associated with Indian scholarship and religion, and that it has been preserved by the Romani populations through oral traditions and in a variety of dialects for many centuries.
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Yaron Matras (I Met Lucky People: The Story of the Romani Gypsies)
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He was viscerally opposed to the Bengalis. I find such sentiments even today. It is incongruous to consider someone you want as an equal partner, at least in theory if not in practice, to fall in line and function as a second class citizen. When I asked him how he expected the majority of the population to accept the rule of the minority, he said some things were ordainded to be and that it was the fate of inferiors to be subservient to the superiors. It was clear that Col. Mujeeb was racially motivated. With such views prevailing even among the intelligentsia, how could one hope for the two Wings to remain united. It was clear that my Pakistan was dead.
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Ikram Sehgal (Escape from Oblivion: The Story of a Pakistani Prisoner of War in India)
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Around 65 percent of the rural population in India defecates in the open and women and girls are expected to go out at night. This does not only threaten their dignity, but their safety as well,
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Anonymous
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the population of Karachi increasing by 369 per cent between 1941 and 1961, possibly the fastest rate of growth ever registered for a city of that size in world history.25 By 1951, according to the first Census of Pakistan, the composition of Karachi’s population had drastically changed. In 1941, 51 per cent of the city’s inhabitants were Hindu and only 42 per cent Muslim. Ten years later, 96 per cent of the city’s total population was Muslim, and only 2 per cent Hindu. According to the Census, refugees from India now accounted for 55 per cent of the total population of the city,
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Laurent Gayer (Karachi: Ordered Disorder and the Struggle for the City)
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One of the standing examples of Gujarat strides in solar power is the Charanka Solar Power Generation Park in North Gujarat which was raised in just one year. The park, which is today Asia’s biggest single-point solar generation facility, produces 225 MW of solar power by 22 private producers who have invested Rs 3400 crores in the park. A work force of 5,000 worked on it for 1 year during peak hours everyday. Says D.J. Pandian, Gujarat’s Energy Secretary: ‘Charanka is a shining example of Gujarat’s enterprise and efficiency.’ What is more, the governance in the energy sector is not marked by just goal setting and achieving. It is a reflection of farsightedness of a rare kind that isn’t visible elsewhere in India. It is best demonstrated in its steps to control the depleting water table with an eye on future. In an age in which populism and vote-bank politics are the norm in Indian democracy, the Modi Government has purposely kept the supply of agriculture power to 8 hours though it can afford to give more power with an eye on rural votes, power being surplus now. The reason is simple, the more the power to the farm sector, the greater the exploitation of groundwater by farmers wanting to earn more by producing more. Striking this fine balance between the farmers’ needs and balancing the natural resources is seen as a fine example of precise planning and farsighted governance free of populism. Interestingly, Modi has been able to maintain this balance even in the face of electoral pressures. In 2012, an election year, the Modi Government did allow new bore connections to farmers in 40 banned tehsils but with a rider: those taking new connections would have to adopt drip or sprinkler method of irrigation which consumes less water and therefore less power.
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Uday Mahurkar (Centrestage: Inside the Narendra Modi model of governance)
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This fragmentation of public authority went even further in Pakistan than in India. In Pakistan, state power never permeated society as deep and far as in India, as the dissemination of highly technological forms of violence within society and the inability of state authorities to enforce a national system of taxation exemplify—two developments that have no parallel in neighbouring India. The evolutions of Karachi’s society over the past four decades bear testimony to this. The proliferation and ever-increasing power of these non-state sovereigns, claiming for themselves the right to discipline and punish but also to protect, tax and represent local populations, has turned the city into a ‘zone of unsettled sovereignties and loyalties’,122 where the access to arms has become the privileged if not the sole venue towards power and wealth.
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Laurent Gayer (Karachi: Ordered Disorder and the Struggle for the City)
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The population of Tigers is growing in India according to the latest figures released from the Indian government.
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Anonymous
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India is not in the same position as the United States is, as the European Union is. There, the farming population is 2 to 3 per cent of their population. Any nation can subsidise indefinitely a population which is 2 to 3 per cent of the total population. But no government in India, I can assure you, whatever may be your political compulsion, can subsidise 70 per cent of the population. We have to evolve a new path in which agriculture has to provide surpluses.9
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Daman Singh (Strictly Personal: Manmohan and Gursharan)
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Now, as to the view that this is how anyone who had suffered imperialism or colonialism would behave: no, it’s not. Entire countries such as India, were colonized. There’s a difference between what’s happening in Iraq with the so-called Islamic State’s attempted genocide of the Yazidi community and how Gandhi acted in India. Let’s take Iraq as a case study and think about it: What does killing the Yazidi population on Mount Sinjar have to do with US foreign policy? What does enforcing headscarves (tents, in fact) on women in Waziristan and Afghanistan, and lashing them, forcing men to grow beards under threat of a whip, chopping off hands, and so forth, have to do with US foreign policy?
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Sam Harris (Islam and the Future of Tolerance: A Dialogue)
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During my time in India, the commitment level of the believers there shocked me. I visited thousands of Christians who had been beaten or watched relatives murdered for their faith. At one point, I said to one of the leaders, “Every believer seems so serious about his or her commitment to Christ. Aren’t there people who just profess Christ but don’t really follow Him?” He answered by explaining that nominal Christianity doesn’t make sense in India. Calling yourself a Christian means you lose everything. Your family and friends reject you, and you lose your home, status, and job. So why would anyone choose that unless he or she is serious about Jesus? I witnessed that same passion during my time in mainland China. The highlight was attending a meeting with underground church members training to become missionaries. The way they prayed and gave testimony about being persecuted was convicting and encouraging. The most surprising part of our time together was when they asked me about church in America. They laughed hysterically when I told them that church for Americans tends to focus on buildings and that people will sometimes switch churches based on music, child care, preaching, or disagreements with other believers. I honestly was not trying to be funny. They laughed in disbelief at our church experiences, thinking it was ridiculous that we would call this Christianity. Keep in mind that the population of China is over 1.3 billion, and in India it’s over 1.2 billion. Meanwhile, there are around 300 million people in the United States. This means that we are a small minority. Our views of “Christianity” are peculiar to the vast majority of the world. I used to think of those “radical believers” overseas as the strange ones. Some simple math revealed to me that in actuality we are the weird ones. The majority of believers on this earth find it laughable that we could reduce the call to follow Jesus and make disciples to an invitation to sit in church service.
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Francis Chan (Crazy Love: Overwhelmed by a Relentless God)
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On the 22nd of September, Jansi was passed at a considerable distance. This city is the most important military station in the Bundelkund, and the spirit of revolt is strong in the lower classes of its population. The town is comparatively modern, and has a great trade in Indian muslins, and blue cotton cloths. There are no ancient remains in this place, but it is interesting to visit its citadel, whose walls the English artillery and projectiles failed to destroy, also the Necropolis of the rajahs, which is remarkably picturesque. This was the chief stronghold of the sepoy mutineers in Central India. There the intrepid Rance instigated the first rising, which speedily spread throughout the Bundelkund. There Sir Hugh Rose maintained an engagement which lasted no less than six days, during which time he lost fifteen percent, of his force. There, in spite of the obstinate resistance of a garrison of twelve thousand sepoys, and backed by an army of twenty thousand, Tantia Topi, Balao Rao (brother of the Nana), and last not least, the Ranee herself, were compelled to yield to the superiority of British arms. It was there, at Jansi, that Colonel Munro had saved the life of his sergeant, McNeil, and given up to him his last drop of water. Yes! Jansi of all places must be avoided in a journey where the route was planned and marked out by Sir Edward’s warmest friends! After passing Jansi, we were detained for several hours by an encounter with travellers of whom Kâlagani had previously spoken. It
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Jules Verne (The Steam House)
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Indeed, in many agricultural regions — including northern China, southern India (as well as the Punjab), Mexico, the western United States, parts of the Middle East, and elsewhere — water may be much more of a constraint to future food production than land, crop yield potential, or most other factors. Developing and distributing technologies and practices that improve water management is critical to sustaining the food production capability we now have, much less increasing it for the future. Water-short Israel is a front-runner in making its agricultural economy more water-efficient. Its current agricultural output could probably not have been achieved without steady advances in water management — including highly efficient drip irrigation, automated systems that apply water only when crops need it, and the setting of water allocations based on predetermined optimum water applications for each crop. The nation’s success is notable: between 1951 and 1990, Israeli farmers reduced the amount of water applied to each hectare of cropland by 36 percent. This allowed the irrigated area to more than triple with only a doubling of irrigation water use.37 Whether
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Laurie Ann Mazur (Beyond the Numbers: A Reader on Population, Consumption and the Environment)
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Black Man’s Land is primarily Africa south of the Sahara Desert. Here dwell the bulk of all the 150,000,000 black men on earth. The negro and negroid population of Africa is estimated at about 120,000,000—four-fifths of the black race-total. Besides its African nucleus the black race has two distant outposts: the one in Australasia, the other in the Americas. The Eastern blacks are found mainly in the archipelagoes lying between the Asiatic land-mass and Australia. They are the Oriental survivors of the black belt which in very ancient times stretched uninterruptedly from Africa across southern Asia to the Pacific Ocean. The Asiatic blacks were overwhelmed by other races ages ago, and only a few wild tribes like the “Negritos” of the Philippines and the jungle-dwellers of Indo-China and southern India
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T. Lothrop Stoddard (The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy)
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India is one of the most populous nations in the world with intellect, care for family, and right mindedness in investments. Why ignore Insurance cover with such a low level of spend when it fits all these 3 attributes! Protect your self, family and assets.
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Meera Srinivasan
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India’s population could not be divided into neat boxes labelled by religion and cross-referenced with social position. India was an amorphous mass of different cultures, lifestyles, traditions and beliefs.
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Alex von Tunzelmann (Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Empire)
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one must read a letter written in November 1950 by Sardar Patel to Nehru. He warned, ‘We can, therefore, safely assume that very soon they (the Chinese) will disown all the stipulations which Tibet has entered into with us in the past... The undefined state of the frontier and the existence on our side of a population with its affinities to Tibetans or Chinese has all the elements of potential trouble between China and ourselves.’ Patel wanted the Indian government immediately to set out a definite policy, particularly in regard to the McMahon Line. Had Patel’s advice been followed, we would not have suffered the humiliation of 1962. Despite advice from within the Congress, Nehru continued to champion China’s cause at the United Nations. It is now well known that even President Truman wanted India to commit itself to the defence of Tibetan independence. Chou En Lai continued to make a fool of the gullible Jawaharlal Nehru.
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Ram Jethmalani (RAM JETHMALANI MAVERICK UNCHANGED, UNREPENTANT)
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But India has a population problem and its left parties also ignore birth control. So after the CPI there was the CPI(M), the Communist Party of India (Marxist), and the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) a.k.a. CPI(M-L). Enough parties? Babe, the party’s only just getting started.
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Salman Rushdie (The Golden House)
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Millions of Nepalese have swelled the armies of cheap mobile labour that drive the global economy, serving in Indian brothels, Thai and Malaysian sweatshops, the mansions of oil sheikhs in the Gulf, and, most recently, the war zones of Iraq. Many more have migrated internally, often from the hills to the subtropical Tarai region on the long border with India. The Tarai produces most of the country's food and cash crops and accommodates half of its population. On its flat alluvial land, where malaria was only recently eradicated, the Buddha was born twenty-five hundred years ago; it is also where a generation of displaced Nepalese began to dream of revolution.
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Pankaj Mishra
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Known as Naxalites...they attacked "class enemies"- big landlords, policemen, bureaucrats, and "liberated" territories which they hoped would form bases for an eventual assault on the cities, as had happened in China. The Indian government responded brutally, killing and torturing thousands. Driven underground, the Naxalite movement splintered and remained dormant for many years.
In the 1990s, when India began to move towards a free market, the Naxalite movement revived in some of the poorest and most populous Indian states. Part of the reason for this is that successive Indian governments have steadily reduced subsidies for agriculture, public health, education, and poverty eradication, exposing large sections of the population to disease, debt, hunger and starvation. Almost three thousand farmers committed suicide in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh after the government, advised by McKinsey, cut agricultural subsidies in an attempt to initiate farmers into the world of unregulated markets. In recent years, Naxalite movements, which have long organized landless, low-caste peasants in Bihar and Andhra Pradesh, have grown quickly in parts of Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh- where an enfeebled Indian state is increasingly absent- to the extent that police and intelligence officials in India now speak anxiously of an unbroken belt of Communist-dominated territory from Nepal to South India.
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Pankaj Mishra (Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet, and Beyond)
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In the 1950s, V. Lilaram & Co. was the first company to charter a Pan American airlines cargo flight with a full load of textiles from New York to the Philippines. The top-selling item, Verhomal noticed, was Jockey undergarments, which catered to the American military which was still present in the Philippines in large numbers after the war. The largest American air and naval bases outside the US mainland were in the Philippines—Verhomal’s main market. From these military bases, Jockey’s market expanded to the local population in the Philippines. Forty years later, in the 1990s, Jockey International (USA) gave the exclusive licence to the Genomals to form a company that would launch and expand Jockey’s presence in India. Within two decades, this company—Page Industries—would go on to become the biggest licensee of Jockey in the world.
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Saurabh Mukherjea (The Unusual Billionaires)
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Therefore, the Burmese felt no particular urge to understand their colonial rulers. This indifference was also encouraged by British attitudes. While the Englishman tended to see the Hindus as ‘serious’, ‘mysterious’, ‘deep’, ‘introverted’, and so on, he usually saw the Burmese as ‘gay’, ‘open’, ‘careless’, ‘childlike’, not a people who needed deep philosophical interpretation. The Burmese returned the compliment by assuming that there was not much that they needed to know about the Englishman beyond the necessities of unavoidable intercourse between the ruler and the ruled. How different it was from India, with the earnest, almost obsessive desire for comprehension at the intellectual level that was producing a string of scholars and philosophers in the western mould! It was true that such Indians constituted only a tiny section of the population, but their impact was strong on the upper classes; and they set the tone for those who would be leaders in the independence movements that were to gather momentum in the twentieth century. II
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Suu Kyi, Aung San (Freedom from Fear: And Other Writings)
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The widest definition of “wealthy” is in India, where a 1% wealth tax kicks in for anybody whose net worth is more than 3 million rupees, which comes to about $45,000. (In India, that still means a small percentage of the population.)
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T.R. Reid (A Fine Mess: A Global Quest for a Simpler, Fairer, and More Efficient Tax System)
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A work of statesmanship that will affect India and Indian history for many a long year. It is nothing less than the pulling back of 62 millions of people (India’s Muslim population at the time) from joining the ranks of the seditious opposition (the Congress).
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Rajmohan Gandhi (Understanding the Founding Fathers: An Enquiry into the Indian Republic's Beginnings)
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In nineteenth-century India, under British colonial rule, authorities decided there were too many venomous cobras in the streets of Delhi, making life uncomfortable for the British residents and their families. To solve this they offered a reward for every dead cobra residents would bring in. Soon enterprising locals began to breed cobras in order to make a living from the bounty. The government caught on to this and canceled the program. The breeders, resentful of the rulers and angered by their actions, decided to release their cobras back on the streets, thereby tripling the population from before the government program.
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Robert Greene (The Laws of Human Nature: Robert Greene)
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Dutch governor of Batavia, Jan Pieterszoon Coen, came up with an alternative plan. Coen founded Batavia, on the island of Java, as the Dutch East India Company’s new capital in 1618. In 1621 he sailed to Banda with a fleet and proceeded to massacre almost the entire population of the islands, probably about fifteen thousand people. All their leaders were executed along with the rest, and only a few were left alive, enough to preserve the know-how necessary for mace and nutmeg production. After this genocide was complete, Coen then proceeded to create the political and economic structure necessary for his plan: a plantation society. The islands were divided into sixty-eight parcels, which were given to sixty-eight Dutchmen, mostly former and current employees of the Dutch East India Company. These new plantation owners were taught how to produce the spices by the few surviving Bandanese and could buy slaves from the East India Company to populate the now-empty islands and to produce spices, which would have to be sold at fixed prices back to the company.
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Daron Acemoğlu (Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty)
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The Monsanto Company views the global water crisis as a multibillion-dollar business opportunity. We see big problems—it sees big money. Monsanto’s Robert Farley admits, “Population growth and economic development will apply increasing pressure on the natural resource markets. . . . These are the markets that are most relevant to us as a life sciences company . . . in which there are predictable sustainability challenges and therefore opportunities to create business value.” 8 Monsanto foresees profits of sixty-three million dollars by 2008 for water ventures in India and Mexico, and other companies are riding the dusty bandwagon to the tune of more than three hundred million a year in these two countries alone. 9
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Heather Flores (Food Not Lawns: How to Turn Your Yard into a Garden and Your Neighborhood into a Community)
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Virgin-soil death rates for smallpox are hard to establish because for the last century most potential research subjects have been vaccinated. But a study in the early 1960s of seven thousand unvaccinated smallpox cases in southern India found that the disease killed 43 percent of its victims. Noting the extreme vulnerability of Andean populations—they would not even have known to quarantine victims, as Europeans had—Dobyns hypothesized that the empire’s population “may well have been halved during this epidemic.” In about three years, that is, as many as one out of two people in Tawantinsuyu died. The human and social costs are beyond measure.
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Charles C. Mann (1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus)
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One of the world’s great human rights catastrophes—unfolding as I write—is the plight of the Rohingya population of Myanmar. As it turns out, this crisis corresponded to the arrival of Facebook, which was quickly inundated by shitposts aimed at the Rohingya.3 At the same time, viral lies about child abductions, in that case mostly on Facebook’s WhatsApp, have destabilized parts of India.4 According to a United Nations report, social media is also a massively deadly weapon, literally, in South Sudan—because of shitposts.5
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Jaron Lanier (Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now)
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Much the same is occurring in India. Already the world’s fastest-growing economy, India will become the world’s most populous nation (probably by 2022) and its biggest economy (possibly by 2048). It, too, runs on coal—with similar consequences. New Delhi, ringed by coal plants, is said to have the world’s most polluted air, worse than anything in China. India’s outdoor air pollution causes 645,000 premature deaths a year, according to a 2015 Nature study. Even in the United States, which uses less coal than other big nations, coal pollution leads to as many as 25,000 deaths per year.
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Charles C. Mann (The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow's World)
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Charity is not sustainable as it depends on donors and is not self-dependents. Considering India’s current social problems including poverty, increasing population and inequality, we need engines that are self-powered, the power that comes from a sustainable source.
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Saurabh Gupta Earth5R
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The demographic challenge was as real as the economic one: whereas in 1870 there were five Europeans to every Indian living in Durban, by 1890 the ratio was closer to two to one. The pattern was similar in other towns of Natal, where, again, Europeans constituted about 40 per cent of the population and the Indians a threatening 20 per cent. As Robert Huttenback has written, this ‘increasing urban concentration of Indians particularly frightened and offended many European settlers to whom it connoted both domestic propinquity and increased commercial competition’.
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Ramachandra Guha (Gandhi Before India)
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Although we looked hard at all the available data and case studies back to early Greece and India, we still have not been able to identify a single case of any non-religious population retaining more than two births per woman for just a century. Wherever religious communities dissolved, demographic decline followed suit.
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Jonathan Sacks (Not in God's Name: Confronting Religious Violence)
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the British ruled India (population 250 millions) with an administrative cadre of under 1,000.
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John Darwin (Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain)
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Religious identity in India has not invariably had a fixed ‘all or nothing’ exclusivity attached to it and there can be identified consistently throughout South Asian history a commonality of religious culture which has operated across what are ostensibly sectarian divides. So, for a Jain lay-person to worship occasionally or regularly a markedly Hindu deity such as Hanumān or Bhairuṇjī does not betoken abandonment of Jainism and consequent adherence to Hinduism, but rather an easy participation within and desire to confirm linkage to a South Asian religious world richly populated with figures redolent of power, prosperity and transcendence who are accessible to all.
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Jeffery D. Long (Jainism: An Introduction (I.B.Tauris Introductions to Religion))
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The impact of the internet on economic development is shifting in two important directions. First, given the aging population and near-saturated market penetration in the advanced economies, most of the expansion of the internet related market will take place in developing countries like Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh. Secondly, the globalization of the internet is expected to increase the share of developing countries in the internet economy presenting a historic opportunity for the young and poor in Pakistan to improve their economic condition.
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Arzak Khan
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Much of the chaos and violence suffered in Afghan villages during the communist era was engineered by a Westernized elite at the head of an active government in Kabul, a city which, with its Persian-speaking population and apparently liberated women, was already alien to most Pashtuns. This may partly explain why the sons of Pashtun peasants and nomads who made up the Taliban imposed the harshest laws upon the women of Kabul soon after driving out the moderate Islamist Tajik commander Ahmed Shah Massoud from this most westernized of Afghan cities in 1996 and forcing him to the north.
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Pankaj Mishra (Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet, and Beyond)
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Explosive population growth in much of Asia was making it less and less plausible that nations like India, Pakistan, and the Philippines would ever be able to feed themselves. In Famine—1975! America’s Decision: Who Will Survive? William and Paul Paddock argued that a Time of Famines would soon lay waste the developing world. “The famines are inevitable,” they warned. And “riding alongside [them] will surely be riots and other civil tensions which the central government[s] will be too weak to control.” The Paddocks derided the naïve hope that “something [would] turn up” to forestall this doom.102 And the Paddocks were not alone in their assessment. Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich, for example, argued that Famine—1975! “may be remembered as one of the most important books of our age.” The Rockefeller Foundation shared these men’s sense of urgency. But, rather than advocate a triage system (as the Paddocks did), in which the worst-off nations would be denied assistance and left to their Darwinian fate, the foundation looked for new ways to attack the problem. The foundation had first extended its agriculture programs to India in 1956, at the request of the Indian national government. In the ensuing years, Rockefeller partnered with USAID and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). Together, they “helped establish five state agriculture universities in India. ” 103 These universities collaborated with their American counterparts on research and training. As it had in Mexico, the foundation thereby contributed to the development, in India, of a community of homegrown agriculturalists with access to the most advanced technologies in the world.
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Joel L. Fleishman (The Foundation: A Great American Secret; How Private Wealth is Changing the World)
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In 2014, some 60,000 women entrepreneurs cover a population of a hundred million deep in rural India where there is poor road and media connectivity. These women doubled their household income in no time. Women started to gain social respectability and for Unilever it was competitive advantage in distribution. “What a tremendous win-win he helped us create.
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Benedict Paramanand (CK Prahalad: The Mind of the Futurist - Rare Insights on Life, Leadership & Strategy)
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Muslims now with only 15-16 percent population have a decisive say in about 200 out of total 542 Lok Sabha
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Darshan Khullar (Pakistan Our Difficult Neighbour and India's Islamic Dimensions)
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Fourteen of the world’s twenty biggest cities are currently experiencing water scarcity or drought. Four billion people, it is estimated, already live in regions facing water shortages at least one month each year—that’s about two-thirds of the planet’s population. Half a billion are in places where the shortages never end. Today, at just one degree of warming, those regions with at least a month of water shortages each year include just about all of the United States west of Texas, where lakes and aquifers are being drained to meet demand, and stretching up into western Canada and down to Mexico City; almost all of North Africa and the Middle East; a large chunk of India; almost all of Australia; significant parts of Argentina and Chile; and everything in Africa south of Zambia.
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David Wallace-Wells (The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming)
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Durban has the largest Indian population outside of India! The Afro-Indian Culture that ensued has become a strong influence on the people of South Africa who have adopted many of the Indian traditions. This is especially true of how food is prepared! Of course rice is the preferred carb and considered a stable with most meals.
An Indian curry stew is an exciting taste treat. Relatively simple to make, fresh garlic and ginger pulp are lightly fried along with chilies, onions and a zesty curry powder.
Added to this are chopped tomatoes and finally the meat, seafood or vegetable of your choice. After slow simmering, the spicy stew is served with steamed rice and perhaps a hot and spicy chili sauce condiment called a sambal. Sweet and sour condiments called chutney are made of unripe mangoes, raisins, limes, sliced bananas and other fruit.. Of course Major Grey's Chutney can be bought ready-made and is considered by many as the best of all chutneys. Many of the curried foods thought of as Indian are actually of Indonesian origin and are also popular on the Malaysian Peninsular and in many other eastern countries.
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Hank Bracker
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Almost everyone in India marries, and the marriages are arranged by the families of the bride and groom.308 This practice is reinforced by religion (both Hinduism and Islam), as well as by the pervasive clan and caste systems. “Love matches” do happen, but they are rare. If a woman wants to elope and marry someone not approved by her family, she might be taking her life into her hands. Women who bring “shame” to their families by marrying without permission can and do become victims of so-called honor killings.
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Darrell Bricker (Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline)
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envoys to southern China to bring back silkworm eggs and established sericulture in Mysore, something that still enriches the region today. He introduced irrigation and built dams so that even his British enemies had to admit that his kingdom was ‘well cultivated, populous with industrious inhabitants, cities [including Bangalore] newly founded and commerce extended’.
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William Dalrymple (The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company)
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In contrast, China has been a relatively isolated civilisation, both geographically and historically. On the eastern side stands the vast Pacific Ocean; to the south and the west, the impassable gorges of the Burma border and the inhospitable plateau of the Tibetan Himalayas, and to the northwest and north, the sparsely populated grasslands of Central Asia and the Gobi desert, the fifth largest desert in the world. Contact with other regions did occur, with India through the northwest corridor, with the Arab world by sea, and through the Silk Road along the steppes. But the salient point is that China has developed her own culture in a far less connected way than Europe. Black African kingdoms have been very isolated: sub-Saharan Africa is surrounded by the Sahara Desert in the north, which hindered contact with the Mediterranean, and by the Kalahari Desert in the south, which partially disconnected the southern plateau and coastal regions from central Africa. On the western side, Africa is faced by the vast Atlantic Ocean that Portuguese navigators only managed to navigate southwards in the 16th century. To the north and south of the equator, Black Africa had to contest with dense rainforests which occupy a west-east band of territory from the southern coast of West Africa across to the Congo basin and all the way to the Kenya highlands. Moreover, with an average elevation of 660 meters, African cultures were limited by the presence of few natural harbours where ships can dock, and few navigable rivers. Of the Niger, the Congo, the Nile, the Zambezi, and the Orange Rivers, only the Nile has relatively long navigable areas.
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Ricardo Duchesne (Faustian Man in a Multicultural Age)
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India is touted today as the most multicultural, ethnically diverse country in the world. This country is home to four major racial groups, which overlap due to racial admixture: Caucasoids, Australoids, Mongoloids and Negritos. With over two thousand ethnic groups, four major families of languages, and multiple religions (Hindus do comprise the vast majority at 80.5% with Islam at 13.4%), India, in the words of Coon, is ‘the most complicated geographically, racially, and culturally’.[38] Yet all these racial groups are descendants of waves of invaders centuries ago; immigration is practically non-existent today, apart from a trickling of Bangladeshi, Pakistani, and Burmese migrants. With its endogamous rules, India has remained racially stable for centuries; its caste divisions have been historically deep, with limited gene flows across racial boundaries. The racial differences that exist can still be traced back to the migrations into India before Christ. The Indian racial populations can be well demarcated as separate from most of the other Asian populations, from the Persian Gulf, Arabia, Burma, China, Vietnamese and Malayan lands. It is not a complicated land to locate on a map; historically the country has always been located more or less in the same place.
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Ricardo Duchesne (Faustian Man in a Multicultural Age)
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The only true minority in India is taxpayers. 2.9% of the total population.
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Nitya Prakash
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According to recent estimates, some 66 per cent of rural residents do not have access to critical medicines, while 31 per cent Indians have to travel more than 30 kilometres to avail themselves of any health care. Just 28 per cent of Indians in urban areas corner 66 per cent of India’s available hospital beds. Mind you, India is still largely a rural country, with around 70 per cent of its population living in rural areas.
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Josy Joseph (A Feast of Vultures: The Hidden Business of Democracy in India)
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Politics and the English Language Orwell says the following on the use of euphemism by politicians: In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers.
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Martin Cohen (Philosophy For Dummies, UK Edition)
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Changes in population growth and productivity growth can require decades to take effect, but clearly they can affect countries’ economic growth rates. In the 20th century, the U.S. surpassed Europe as an economic power. Then Japan seemed to sprint forward in the 1970s and 1980s, threatening to take over the world, until the late ’80s, when it fell back into negligible growth. The emerging markets—and especially China—were the site of rapid growth over the last few decades, and while their growth is slower at the moment, they may well outgrow the developed world in the next few decades. India has human resources that can make it a rapid-growth economy if it can increase its efficiency and reduce corruption. And frontier nations like Nigeria and Bangladesh stand behind the emerging nations, waiting for their turn as rapid growers.
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Howard Marks (Mastering The Market Cycle: Getting the Odds on Your Side)
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I have dwelt at length on famines because they offer such an outstanding example of British colonial malfeasance. One could have cited epidemic disease as well, which constantly laid Indians low under British rule while the authorities stood helplessly by. To take just the first four years of the twentieth century, as Durant did: 272,000 died of plague in 1901, 500,000 in 1902, 800,000 in 1903, and 1 million in 1904 the death toll rising every year. During the Spanish Influenza epidemic of 1918, 125 million cases of ‘flu were recorded (more than a third of the population), and India’s fatality rate was higher than any Western country’s: 12.5 million people died. As the American statesman (and three-time Democratic presidential candidate) William Jennings Bryan pointed out, many Britons were referring to the deaths caused by plague as ‘a providential remedy for overpopulation’. It was ironic, said Bryan, that British rule was sought to be justified on the grounds that ‘it keeps the people from killing each other, and the plague praised because it removes those whom the Government has saved from slaughter!’.
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Shashi Tharoor (Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India)
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Indian democracy has taught the world the beauty and competitiveness of its governing system for a prolonged period. But Modi administration is remapping the Indian political map which some called the rise of nationalism, while others called it the rise of patriotism in this era of populism.
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Nilantha Ilangamuwa
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The same pattern, liberalization followed by an increase in the earnings of skilled workers relative to the unskilled, as well as other measures of inequality, was found in Colombia, Brazil, Argentina, and India. Finally, inequality exploded in China as it gradually opened up starting in the 1980s and eventually joined the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001. According to the World Inequality Database team, in 1978 the bottom 50 percent and the top 10 percent of the population both took home the same share of Chinese income (27 percent).
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Abhijit V. Banerjee (Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems)
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According to Laura Betzig, in the first civilizations (ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Aztec, the Inca, imperial India, and China), “powerful men mate with hundreds of women, pass their power on to a son by one legitimate wife, and take the lives of men who get in their way.” As I explained earlier, these men may have been powerful because they were good systemizers. The fact that they eliminated those who stood up to them implies that they were also low empathizers. And they certainly seemed to have an efficient means of disseminating their genes (polygyny). So we can envision how the genotype for brain type S might have spread widely throughout a male population.
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Simon Baron-Cohen (The Essential Difference: Male And Female Brains And The Truth About Autism)
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According to International Diabetes Foundation, diabetes had long moved from being “a rich man’s disease”. With diabetes now affecting all the segments of Indian population, India stands on the verge of becoming “the diabetes capital of the world” with around 61 million people affected by the disease and expecting to cross 100 million people by 2030. Given the scale of diabetes epidemic, the NPPA justified its price control orders. On hearing the above, all hell broke loose in the Indian Pharma. The Indian pharma industry reacted very aggressively to this decision. Both Indian and multinationals raised concerns that “India’s investment image” had gone to the dogs and that the industry would have to shut down if the same trend continues. The Indian pharma lobbies also filed in the Delhi and Bombay High Courts, and prayed for a stay order which they were not granted, as many Supreme Court judgments had earlier justified price controls on medicines in public interest Modi’s Government rescues India’s Investment Image Given the relentless Industry demands, the Modi government decided to clip the wings of NPPA which was supposedly an expert body of regulators and withdrew their powers to pass such orders in the future. The decision of Modi government to withdraw the powers of the National Pharmaceutical Pricing Authority (NPPA) to set price caps on drugs raises serious questions on the state’s commitment to the welfare of the poor. As a result, over 108 essential drugs will now lie outside the ambit of NPPA and its internal guidelines on regulation and control of drugs would cease to apply to them. According to the government, the reasoning for withdrawal of powers of NPPA and clipping of its wings was because “it lacked legality”. Interestingly, the Modi government has found that NPPA was not legally competent to pass price control orders after over 17 years of its creation and immediately after it passed orders that would restrain pharma companies from making super normal profits.
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Imran Hussain (The Chaos Republic: Reflections on the Indian State)
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Dutch governor of Batavia, Jan Pieterszoon Coen, came up with an alternative plan. Coen founded Batavia, on the island of Java, as the Dutch East India Company’s new capital in 1618. In 1621 he sailed to Banda with a fleet and proceeded to massacre almost the entire population of the islands, probably about fifteen thousand people.
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Daron Acemoğlu (Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty)
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Of the rise of this singular people few authentic records appear to exist. It is, however, probable that they represent a later wave of that race, whether true Sudras, or a later wave of immigrants from Central Asia, which is found farther south as Mahratta; and perhaps they had, in remote times, a Scythian origin like the earlier and nobler Rajputs. They affect Rajput ways, although the Rajputs would disdain their kinship; and they give to their chiefs the Rajput title of "Thakur," a name common to the Deity and to great earthly lords, and now often used to still lower persons. So much has this practice indeed extended, that some tribes use the term generically, and speak of themselves as of the "Thakur" race. These, however, are chiefly pure Rajputs. It is stated, by an excellent authority, that even now the Jats "can scarcely be called pure Hindus, for they have many observances, both domestic and religious, not consonant with Hindu precepts. There is a disposition also to reject the fables of the Puranic Mythology, and to acknowledge the unity of the Godhead." (Elliot's Glossary, in voce "Jat.") Wherever they are found, they are stout yeomen; able to cultivate their fields, or to protect them, and with strong administrative habits of a somewhat republican cast. Within half a century, they have four times tried conclusions with the might of Britain. The Jats of Bhartpur fought Lord Lake with success, and Lord Combermere with credit; and their "Sikh" brethren in the Panjab shook the whole fabric of British India on the Satlaj, in 1845, and three years later on the field of Chillianwala. The Sikh kingdom has been broken up, but the Jat principality of Bhartpur still exists, though with contracted limits, and in a state of complete dependence on the British Government. There is also a thriving little principality — that of Dholpur — between Agra and Gwalior, under a descendant of the Jat Rana of Gohad, so often met with in the history of the times we are now reviewing (v. inf. p. 128.) It is interesting to note further, that some ethnologists have regarded this fine people as of kin to the ancient Get¾, and to the Goths of Europe, by whom not only Jutland, but parts of the south-east of England and Spain were overrun, and to some extent peopled. It is, therefore, possible that the yeomen of Kent and Hampshire have blood relations in the natives of Bhartpur and the Panjab. The area of the Bhartpur State is at present 2,000 square miles, and consists of a basin some 700 feet above sea level, crossed by a belt of red sandstone rocks. It is hot and dry; but in the skilful hands that till it, not unfertile; and the population has been estimated at near three-quarters of a million. At the time at which our history has arrived, the territory swayed by the chiefs of the Jats was much more extensive, and had undergone the fate of many another military republic, by falling into the hands of the most prudent and daring of a number of competent leaders. It has already been shown (in Part I.) how Suraj Mal, as Raja of the Bhartpur Jats, joined the Mahrattas in their resistance to the great Musalman combination of 1760. Had his prudent counsels been followed, it is possible that this resistance would have been more successful, and the whole history of Hindustan far otherwise than what it has since been. But the haughty leader of the Hindus, Sheodasheo Rao Bhao, regarded Suraj Mal as a petty landed chief not accustomed to affairs on a grand scale, and so went headlong on his fate.
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H.G. Keene (Fall of the Moghul Empire of Hindustan)
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The great spiritual bond is Islam, yet in India, the chief seat of brown population, Islam is professed by only one-fifth of the inhabitants. Nevertheless,
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T. Lothrop Stoddard (The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy)
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If the world’s population had the productivity of the Swiss, the consumption habits of the Chinese, the egalitarian instincts of the Swedes, and the social discipline of the Japanese, then the planet could support many times its current population without privation for anyone. On the other hand, if the world’s population had the productivity of Chad, the consumption habits of the United States, the inegal-itarian instincts of India, and the social discipline of Argentina, then the planet could not support anywhere near its current numbers. 9 NO
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Laurie Ann Mazur (Beyond the Numbers: A Reader on Population, Consumption and the Environment)
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Expand your egg business through latest technologies
In India, poultry farming is still lagging behind in terms of infrastructure, skilled manpower and resources. Government has tried to overcome troubles but still egg farm owners in semi-urban or rural areas aren’t utilized technologies due to lack of knowledge and training. On the contrary, farmers in foreign countries develop smart egg processed plant to produce better quality eggs. Technologies are playing keen role to expand egg business sector. Indian farmers should be trained on modern-day technologies to increase productivity.
Fast-growing population demanded delicious egg dishes, thus people who are interested to run a restaurant probably sell eggs. Here also you can use technology to develop effective management system, inventory solutions and check product quality as well. It goes without saying that egg industry encompasses varies business categories but you should involve technology to make most advantage and profits. There is trend among foreign countries to cut down cost on unnecessary labours thus they are concentrating on emerging technologies.
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andeywala
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struck him as a favorable contrast with his own nation that there was no slavery in India;II and that though the population was divided into castes according to occupations, it accepted these divisions as natural and tolerable
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Will Durant (Our Oriental Heritage (Story of Civilization 1))
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The majority of India's adult and elderly population is too medieval to think as civilized, rational and progressive human beings.
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Abhijit Naskar
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Reflecting this difference is the Indian state of Kerala. Although it is one of the poorer parts of the country, it has higher literacy and greater gender equality than much of the rest of India. Without resorting to a coercive approach such as a “one-child policy” Kerala has achieved a rate of population growth lower than China’s and also lower than that in some developed countries, including
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Peter Singer (The Life You Can Save: How to play your part in ending world poverty)
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The British tended to base their refusal to intervene in famines with adequate governmental measures on a combination of three sets of considerations: free trade principles (do not interfere with market forces), Malthusian doctrine (growth in population beyond the ability of the land to sustain it would inevitably lead to deaths, thereby restoring the ‘correct’ level of population) and financial prudence (don’t spend money we haven’t budgeted for).
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Shashi Tharoor (An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India)
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Pakistanis must figure out why India, which inherited similar institutions from the British Raj, maintained democracy consistently after Independence while Pakistan could not. They should also examine how Bangladesh has been able to expand its economy while reducing its population after breaking off from Pakistan.
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Husain Haqqani (Reimagining Pakistan: Transforming a Dysfunctional Nuclear State)
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India—the land of Buddha, Mahavir, Ashoka and Gandhi—imagines itself to be a civilization rooted in non-violence. But the fact that these great apostles of peace belong to India only accentuates the terror that has blighted this land for centuries. Unfortunately, the history, geography, composition and reality of Indian society make terrorist violence almost inevitable. This would be true of any society with similar characteristics—a hugely diverse population that is riven with divisions and inequities. And it is our misfortune that we have rarely been blessed with a strong, non-partisan, non-sectarian leadership that can keep turbulence in check.
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Barkha Dutt (This Unquiet Land: Stories from India's Fault Lines)
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The process occurs in the U.S. and globally. Thus, many analysts have found other names for such surplus populations suffering exploitation. Comparative literature theorist Rob Nixon writes of “remaindered humans” as the compacted left-overs “on whom neoliberalism’s inequities bear down most heavily.”[72] Mike Davis has discussed them as what the system sees: mere “global residium.”[73] Annu Jalais in India references these groups as neoliberalism’s “dispensable peoples.”[74] Global developmental agencies building megadams (usually funded by the World Bank) create what Thayer Scudder termed “developmental refugees.”[75] Yet, as all these authors stress—and this will be a main point of this book’s Part Two as it develops a “counter-theatrics to state terror”—these groups are agential; they persist and can animate resistance in unexpected ways.
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Mark Lewis Taylor (The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America)
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Indira Gandhi left behind several legacies—dynastic rule, economic control through populism—such as, bank nationalisation, Garibi Hatao and the 20-point programme—but most importantly, she left behind a centralised institutionalisation of political corruption that has matured into another Frankenstein, devouring the nation and the poor of India.
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Ram Jethmalani (RAM JETHMALANI MAVERICK UNCHANGED, UNREPENTANT)