Like the thawing Charles River, Chats on the Charles is slowly coming back on line as we enter spring. I wanted to vet your appetite with this article reviewing a genetic study on the origins of Indians. And if it gets too technical, here is a concise summary from the author.
“What is abundantly clear is that we are a multi-source civilisation, not a single-source one, drawing its cultural impulses, its tradition and practices from a variety of lineages and migration histories. The Out of Africa immigrants, the pioneering, fearless explorers who discovered this land originally and settled in it and whose lineages still form the bedrock of our population; those who arrived later with a package of farming techniques and built the Indus Valley Civilisation whose cultural ideas and practices perhaps enrich much of our traditions today; those who arrived from East Asia, probably bringing with them the practice of rice cultivation and all that goes with it; those who came later with a language closely related to Sanskrit and its associated beliefs and practices and reshaped our society in fundamental ways; and those who came even later for trade or for conquest and chose to stay, all have mingled and contributed to this civilisation we call Indian. We are all migrants.”
As expected, it busts many of the myths peddled in India today, scientifically and with great detail. History is never as clean as autocrats would like it to be!!
This study is part of a broader global research effort at Harvard Medical School which resulted in a seminal article in Nature Magazine. Quoting from that effort,
“A study of hundreds of new genomes from across the globe has yielded insights into modern human genetic diversity and ancient population dynamics, including compelling evidence that essentially all non-Africans today descend from a single migration out of Africa.”
Somebody please tell that to the powers that be. Don Trump and Don King are cousins!!!
Chats on the Charles 
There is a closer to home link in terms of the normalization of the caste system and all the baggage that goes along with it too.
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