What connects Mongolia with Europe? The only thing Mongolia has been famous for is Genghis khan. Apart from laying foundations to the longest continuous empire in the history of mankind, he also laid a lot of other foundations. Apparently 0.5% (35 million) of all people in the world are direct decedents of Genghis Khan. Apart from this freakishly fertile conqueror. There is nothing much of note about Mongolia. Wrong!!! 
Mongolia played a direct role in changing the face of Europe for ever. 

Imagine a place with huge unemployment, great divide between rich and poor. The streets were filled with hundreds of thousands of homeless and the poor. People starving, 10’s of people competing for every available job.  This is not Draravi . This was Europe in 14th century. With the living standards declining, the land going barren Europeans were struggling to make ends meet. Europe was about the enter a point of no return.

Lets go off topic for a minute, I want to mention the actual thing that inspired me to write this post. If you compare all Dan Brown works, Inferno will definitely be the worst. The book was all that bad, but unlike his other work, it doesn’t dazzle you. In the book, a very talented scientist creates a weapon capable of wiping out 1/3rd of the Earth’s population. Robert Langdon has to stop him. In the movie adaptation he does, but in the actual book he fails. Its revealed that its a airborne virus that makes 1/3 of the population infertile. So, there is no blood bath. Only substantial decrease in population(eventually). The scientist actually wanted to save mankind from destroying itself and this was his solution. Clever! was my first reaction. Then, I thought It would really help the Earth if something like that really happened. It was a lot of time later that I realised, Dan Brown actually took a incident from the history and tweaked it into a book. 

So, Europe was in a bad state. What did Mongolia have to do with it? Did it give a financial aid? No. The concept in Inferno was problems of mankind being solved by a sudden decrease in population. The picture of a masked girl should have given you a clue of what I’m arriving at. The Black Plague of 1347. The thing that killed about 1/3rd of European population. From Russia to England. This originated in.. Yes Mongolia. It plague spread like a wild fire. It arrived in Sicily in 1347, in the next five years it killed millions of people. It did not go away easily. There were cases reported for next 3 centuries. There is no exact record of how many people died. Only speculation. Some studies say, it might be as high as 200 million. That’s a lot of deaths. In the above picture, the mask and the costume are of a ‘Plague doctor’. They are the ones who cured(tried to cure) the plague victims. The masks were designed to protect them from putrid air, which was seen as the cause of infection

How did this solve Europe’s problems? India has a lot of similar problems. Imagine if India’s population were to reduce from 1.3 billion to 870 million by year 2020. That’s same as the country’s population in 1990. What would happen to the Unemployment & poverty? Get it?

A lot of demand for work was created. Labour could demand good wages or the rich were left to work in their own fields. This reduced the economic divide. The availability of labour was scarce, so people started looking for options. They invented machines. Army had fewer men. So, muskets and cannons came into being. A lot of advances were made in the field of Medicine. Earlier hospitals only separated the sick from healthy. Now they started looking for ways to cure them. The power of church weakened, because people lost hope in the catholic church when it couldn’t help cure their ailments. Once the Plague was gone, there was renaissance. Not of just arts, but every aspect of life for Europeans. 

Some thing good happened from a very bad event. Now let us get to the Ugly part. Humanity did not learn from its mistakes. The earth is getting over crowded with humans. The only species that cannot exist in equilibrium with its surroundings. The polar ice caps are melting. There are more and more natural disasters. The campaigns of ‘Save the trees’, ‘Save the planet’ you see now a days are in-fact self preservation attempts. Will they work? Can we save our selves or will the Earth throw another epidemic in our face? Humans think they are an advanced race because they can have a video call on the move. Do you think Nature cares about stuff like Internet of things, Artificial Intelligence? All your gadgets will turn to paper weights you don’t have electricity for a couple of days. 
George Carlin did an amazing piece on this topic. (FYI, I love George and his point of view). Rather than quoting an excerpt from this gig, I’m including the video. 

History repeats itself. Ebola and HIV are attempts by Nature to restore balance. We have been able to survive(for now). But how long before the Nature figures out another way?