Word: brahmaputra
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...windows of the British-made Trident jet that the Chinese provided for the trip, the majesty and mystery of the Himalayas extend into snowcapped infinity. We glided over the headwaters of the great Mekong and Salween rivers, then followed the Tsangpo River, which is the source for the Brahmaputra in India. Near the Tibetan capital of Lhasa, the mountains rise brown, harsh and uninhabited from a narrow valley that grudgingly spreads to a width of a mile at the airfield where we touched down...
...green could ever have a food problem. This is the richest and most fertile farmland in the world--nothing in Iowa or the Ukraine can compare to it. The whole country is a delta formed by two of the mightiest rivers in the world, the Ganges and the Brahmaputra. Since the Brahmaputra is essentially liquid topsoil and the Ganges flowing shit, the resource base for producing the highest crop yields in the world are there. With their weather which allows a twelve month growing season the Bengalis should be able to produce enough crops to feed 300 million people. That...
...Bangla! Jai Bangla!" From the banks of the great Ganges and the broad Brahmaputra, from the emerald rice fields and mustard-colored hills of the countryside, from the countless squares of countless villages came the cry. "Victory to Bengal! Victory to Bengal!" They danced on the roofs of buses and marched down city streets singing their anthem Golden Bengal. They brought the green, red and gold banner of Bengal out of secret hiding places to flutter freely from buildings, while huge pictures of their imprisoned leader, Sheik Mujibur Rahman, sprang up overnight on trucks, houses and signposts. As Indian troops...
...back to Dacca next day, I came upon a convoy trucker who had been waiting for five days for his turn to board a ferry and cross the miles-wide junction of the great Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers. As we huddled under the tailgate to keep dry, a shopkeeper joined us. Gazing at the puddle forming beneath us, he said: 'Even the skies are weeping for this land...
...sprouts vegetation at the drop of a seed, yet that has not prevented Bengal from becoming a festering wound of poverty. Nature can be as brutal as it is bountiful, lashing the land with vicious cyclones and flooding it annually with the spillover from the Ganges and the Brahmaputra rivers...