While the entire nation is busy CABing and fighting over the issue of invasion of outsiders into Indian Territory, an invasion that matters far more is already happening from Pakistan into India.

The year 2019 probably marks a year of resurgence of one of the great Biblical plagues, as almost after twenty years, we are seeing a massive locust attack in North Gujarat, and it is clear that it is neither the first nor the largest of attacks, as the probability of occurrence of conditions suitable for locust swarming is rising each year because of a simple phenomenon.

The reason could be anything ranging from the wasteful lifestyle of people of Greta-land or something completely natural, one undeniable change that is amongst us is increasing temperatures across the globe, and however detrimental this change could be for us, there is one group of creatures that simply love it.

On a heating planet, the golden age of insects is arriving.

As mercury will go up, seawater may or may not engulf our large cities, but the insect population is bound to explode. And when it will, we will be hit by a tsunami far deadlier than the one that a sea can produce, because that tsunami will be a wave of pathogenic diseases.

As someone who has wasted almost a decade trying to convince Indian administration (and failing miserably) to understand the exponential maths used by nature, I have developed a personal insight about how we cognise insects.

Most probably because insects are small and no individual insect can really endanger a human being (other than few venomous ones), it is almost impossible to convince either the state or the society that insects can become a survival threat for humans.

Though the writing is on the cards for those who want to read in terms of the explosion of vector-borne diseases in most large cities across India, other than random (once or twice in season) mention of dengue numbers or malaria deaths, insects rarely move from middle pages to the headlines.

While we continue being insect-agnostic and remain busy with what Zuckerberg is feeding us every day, the rising temperatures are slowly but surely doubling the insect numbers with each passing year and becoming vectors of new pathogens that are coming out of jungles or may even come out of melting arctic ice. What is worse for us is our response to this problem that can be looked at as nothing but chopping the very branch that we are sitting on.

While insects can and will kill, they are also the cogs of the great machine of life. As we respond to the insect problem using pesticides as a brute force solution, we are also destroying pollinators like bees and disrupting the very engine of life.

As I am watching the state waging an all-out insecticide war against the locust in Gujarat in response to the farmers clamouring for help and poisoning the land and water, I am getting really confused, as it is getting increasingly difficult to decide what will kill us first, the problem or the solution that we think we have for it.

From global warming to climate change, we need to realise that the first responder will not be the forces of nature, but the life on earth. Forces of nature will move slowly as they respond to bigger cues, but life on earth is a dynamic force that has its foot soldiers that can move far more rapidly.

From invisible virus to massive blue whale, life is constantly responding to all changes to the planet, and the smaller a life-form, the more rapidly it will evolve. A whale may take a million years to change but a virus will do it in the day. So, the change in the environment of the planet will mean a bottom-up reorganisation of the pyramid of life.

We need to start watching the changes to the life on earth far more seriously than watching the cyclones and hurricanes that global warming is surely going to increase because what is likely to kill us is going to come from a completely different direction than where we are focusing.