Thank you all for your responses. It was nice to find people who share a passion for technical studies. I will respond later on with a detailed post. I am creating a simple blog, perhaps later on everybody can contribute to making it bigger.

possible effects of iran – india decoupling:
1. india is free to do business and politics in arab world. this will be similar to india’s decoupling from palestine…
At the heart of it Arabs are plainly stupid desert baddus while Persians are smarter. In short to medium term Arabs are a better choice of ally. If Iran gets 20-ish years good run it could annihilate Arab competition. In the long run Iran will win in both scenarios(i.e. (a)it remains belligerent mullah state and Arab oil runs out, (b) if the Iranian revolution fails,Ayatollahs loose, Iran becomes a normal country and the Arab oil runs out). Anyways India has historically kept it’s own interest well guarded, we had supported Saddam against Iran for quite some time.
2. pak-iran conflict in balochistan/sistian will reduce, due to chinese mediation, thus freeing pakistani forces there to be sent to the indian front.
It was a minor irritant even at it’s peak.
3. long term usefulness of chabar port was suspect, as a taliban govt in kabul will hardly deal with india.
Long term prospects of Gwadar are also suspect. Pakistanis are hysterical and over-hype it. Let them waste their time and energy nothing we say or do will make them better or worse.
4. it will be very difficult for shias of india to look up to iran for moral leadership. they might go deep into bjp.
5. india may heat up balochistan more.
India doesn’t have the will or the capacity to pull anything (that would be worth the global shaming that follows) off.
6. gawadar vs chabar will be interesting.
World of infrastructure projects doesn’t work like that. On timescales tending to 10 to 15+ years all kinds of crazy projections can be made on power point presentations. But real world is messy, in the best of circumstances these would be D-tier ports. India wants to sell stuff to Iran and Afghanistan, it will do it one way or the other. Even in the worst case scenario there is always Bandar Abbas.
Most geostrategy people are idiots. Don’t take their plans and projections seriously.

@slapstick
Went through some of Chris’s blog post. Very lucid material, excellent.

I’ll just leave this here:

https://www.change.org/p/justice-for-indian-grandfather-mr-patel

Jay, the idea that people from Kerala emigrated as a reaction to stifling socialist policies is common held. Something that makes me doubt that as a principle cause however, is that the entire west coast belt up through mangalore, udupi, goa, and ratnagiri , not to mention sri lanka were also part of this exodus. Theres a great deal of policy diversity in all those places. The thing they all have in common though is really high HDI relative to inland regions. Many of them intitially left to work on oil rigs, become drivers and so forth, but compared to other indians they make great clerical workers. Experience working in the gulf is great for upward mobility at home, in a way that bangalore and mumbai have yet to offer i feel.

I was contemplating about making a blog for technical subjects explained lucidly; another purpose is to build a simple site to host learning material for revision purposes. Any advice on this matter? What technology stack do you use, e.g., CMS to manage content? Would some type of wiki format be better for collaboration, and community engagement?

Some Questions: What is the origin of the Phoenicians? What happened to them? Why are they not sea people? They were also expert sailors, right? Why do Jews mention them?

the ‘sea people’ were aegean. proto-greeks

Carthage IIRC was a Phoenician civilization. They were also known as the sea people. One interesting video that I saw: 1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed (Eric Cline, PhD)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRcu-ysocX4.

Eric is the best history speaker that I have seen. Damn good video to watch.

“If India were to get to $4000 GDP per capita, it would see more emigration pressure, not less. It’s hard to say at what cut-off point it ends, but it seems that at $10,000 things start to slow down a bit, at the very least.”

Using the rule of 72 and taking an optimistic growth rate of 7.2% over the next 20 years for ease of calculation, India’s per capita should be around $4000 by 2030 and $10000 between 2040 and 2045. So that’s a window of 15ish years where the emigration rate would be higher. Although given the bad press migration has received over the past few years I not sure if all the emigrants would be welcome.