A Little More about Orwell

I think it to be fascinating that Blair had such insight to write a book like 1984. He must have been such a visionary, or did he just look around and find his inspiration already in 1944 or before.
Such vision pushed me to believe there was more there then first meets the eye, and I did a little research (mostly Wikipedia) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Orwell
And so I learned he was born in colonized India and his father worked at the Opium department of the Civil Service, an old branch of the East India Trading Company. What was civil about selling opium to the Chinese even though the Chinese Gov. was strongly opposed to it, I'm not sure (this is where the similarities with the book starts: In the book the minister of Love takes care of War, in real life the Civil Service is poisoning an entire country with drugs). His mother, Ida Mabel Blair (née Limouzin), had a French father who was involved in speculative ventures in Burma where she grew up, his great-grandfather Charles Blair had been a wealthy plantation owner in Jamaica and his grandfather a clergyman.
So, to recap his father was involved in the opium trade, he was an Imperial Police man (in charge of 200,000 troops in India) and a noble.
Does this puts him in a situation where he could have heard plans for India and it's population that could have inspired his writing? After all some companies are known today, for hiring millitas to "protect their financial interests" and others hold monopolies on basic industries like utilities, waste management, and water distribution, of entire and sometimes multiple countries. The only difference between this and colonization is the flag on top of City Hall. Unfortunately he is not around to answer that question, as he died in 1950 of tuberculosis, he was only 46 years old.
Nonetheless, his writing are more relevant today than ever, so are some other notables in the past, with much less leftist views.