Best comment on this thread!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
That's very well said,indeed. Robots are going to be the best and finest warriors on Earth or have they already become one?
It will still be the man behind the machine that will count most.
Training/caliber of the pilot/his physical and mental attributes/experience/caliber of the rival he is pitted against/situation of engagement etc etc.
A Gnat taking down a Sabre and Centurions blowing up Pattons are case in point.(Sabres and Pattons were the technology marvels of that time)
Makers of finest robots will count in future victories.
Coming back to the discussion of us (mere mortals),following excerpts pasted from a book (Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official Author: William Sleeman) have actually hit the nail on the head.
The Author is purposely pro Rajputs all the way and treats rest of the Indians as a****les and he's got every reason to do that as he is passing through the Rajput principalities who are in full support of British Empire.
Still, he couldn't resist the temptation of telling the truth albiet in a very subtle way.
Near the artillery practice-ground, we passed the tomb of Jodh Bâî,the wife of the Emperor Akbar, and the mother of Jahângîr. She was of Râjpût caste, daughter of the Hindoo chief of Jodhpur, a very beautiful, and, it is said, a very amiable woman. The Mogul Emperors, though Muhammadans, were then in the habit of taking their wives from among the Râjpût princes of the country, with a view to secure their allegiance. The tomb itself is in ruins, having only part of the dome standing, and the walls and magnificent gateway that
at one time surrounded it have been all taken away and sold by a thrifty Government, or appropriated to purposes of more practical utility.
I have heard many Muhammadans say that they could trace the decline of their empire in Hindustan to the loss of the Râjpût blood in the veins of their princes. 'Better blood' than that of the Râjpûts of India certainly never flowed in the veins of any human beings; or,what is the same thing, no blood was ever believed to be finer by the people themselves and those they had to deal with. The difference is all in the imagination, and the imagination is all-powerful with nations as with individuals.
The Britons thought their blood the finest in the world till they were conquered by the Romans, the Picts, the Scots, and the Saxons. The Saxons thought theirs the finest in the world till they were conquered by the Danes and the Normans. This is the history of the human race. The quality of the blood of a whole people has depended often upon the fate of a battle,which in the ancient world doomed the vanquished to the hammer; and the hammer changed the blood of those sold by it from generation to generation.
How many Norman robbers got their blood ennobled, and how many Saxon nobles got theirs plebeianized by the Battle of Hastings;and how difficult it would be for any of us to say from which we descended--the Britons or the Saxons, the Danes or the Normans; or in what particular action our ancestors were the victors or the vanquished, and became ennobled or plebeianized by the thousand accidents which influence the fate of battles. A series of successful aggressions upon their neighbours will commonly give a nation a notion that they are superior in courage; and pride will make them
attribute this superiority to blood--that is, to an old date. This was, perhaps, never more exemplified than in the case of the Gûrkhas of Nepal, a small diminutive race of men not unlike the Huns, but certainly as brave as any men can possibly be. A Gûrkha thought himself equal to any four other men of the hills, though they were
all much stronger; just as a Dane thought himself equal to four Saxons at one time in Britain. The other men of the hills began to think that he really was so, and could not stand before him.
Although it may be admitted that the Râjpût strain of blood improved the constitution of the royal family of Delhi, the decline and fall of the Timuride dynasty cannot be truly ascribed to 'the loss of the Râjpût blood in the veins' of the ruling princes. The empire was tottering to its fall long before the death of Aurangzêb,who 'had himself married two Hindoo wives; and he wedded his son Muazzam (afterwards the Emperor Bahâdur) to a Hindoo princess, as his forefathers had done before him'. (Lane-Poole, _The History of theMoghul Emperors of Hindustan illustrated by their Coins_, p. xviii. )
The wonder is, not that the empire of Delhi fell, but that it lasted so long.
