Strong in spirit, steady in purpose, limitless in dreams. LIC of India celebrates the power and grace of every woman. # LIC #happywomensday
R K SAHNI
7 comments:
Anonymous
said...
What a hypocrisy! LIC refused family pension for 37 years from inception. When private insurer "Oriental life" gave pension to its staff even before "Nationalisation" like GOI and SBI. LIC paid pensions on stagnant wages prevailed for 37 years with 15% family pension for 3 decades after with no hope of its revision till this day with the support of greedy and selfish In-service who enjoy more than double the real wages and double the pension treating retired staff as "Dead Wood" while it gifted tens of lakhs of crores windfall profit to GOI over and above what is invested as Capital with cumulatively 12% return PA when all PSUs and PSBs are in RED due to written off lakhs of crores of loans taken by wilful defaulters who enjoy top luxurious lives. It is called "Secular Socialism" a fundamental right inserted by a dictator during the emergency rule and implemented correctly for the past 5 decades and discriminations reduced to Zero by Gods, Govts and Elites of the Nation.
Joseph, Tony: Early Indians: The Story of Our Ancestors and Where We Came From: Juggernaut Publication: Why this book now There is a reason why this book could have been written only now, and not earlier. It is because our understanding of deep history has changed dramatically in the last one decade or so. Large stretches of our prehistory are being rewritten as we speak, based on analysis of DNA extracted from individuals who lived thousands or tens of thousands of years ago. Many ‘facts’ that we took for granted have been proved wrong, and many questions left dangling in the air as historians, archaeologists and anthropologists argued it out among themselves have been given convincing new answers – thanks to the recently acquired ability of genetic scientists to successfully extract DNA from ancient fossils and then sequence it to understand all that bound people together, or distinguished them from each other. If technology had not matured to the level it has, scientists would not have been able to make the discoveries they are making today. And if it were not for their latest findings, our prehistory would have remained as vague and contentious as earlier and this book would not have been written. Just to get a sense of the speed at which things have moved, consider this: when work on this book began a decade ago, we did not know who were the people of the Harappan Civilization or where their descendants had gone, but now we do. A decade ago, we did not know how much of our ancestry we owed to the original Out of Africa migrants who reached India about 65,000 years ago, but now we do. A decade ago, we did not know when the caste system began, but now we can zero in on the period with a fair degree of genetic accuracy. These are just a few examples that demonstrate our rapidly improving understanding of prehistory, and not only with regard to India. Here’s a short list of things that have changed about human prehistory in other parts of the world because of ancient DNA: we now know that large portions of European populations were replaced not once but twice within the last 10,000 years. First, a mass migration of farmers from west Asia around 9000 years ago mixed with or replaced already established hunter-gatherers in Europe. And then a mass migration from the Eurasian Steppes about 5000 years ago mixed with or replaced the then existing population of European farmers. In the Americas, we now know that native American populations, before the arrival of Europeans, owed their ancestry to not one but at least three migrations from Asia. In east Asia, we know that much of the ancestry of people in the region derives from two or more major expansions of populations from the Chinese agricultural heartland. In 2010 we learned that modern humans had interbred with Neanderthals and in 2014 we learned that our ancestors had interbred with Denisovans (a member of the Homo species that was identified only because of ancient DNA sequencing) as well. When this journey began in 2012, though, I did not know that the field I was getting into, prehistory, was just about to experience an explosion of new knowledge. That is something that happened serendipitously. When I started, I was fascinated by the Harappan Civilization and the questions that were still unsettled: who were the people who built the largest civilization of their time, and where did they go? I visited Harappan sites from Dholavira and Lothal in Gujarat to Rakhigarhi in Haryana, which led me on to many meetings and email discussions with leading historians, archaeologists, epigraphists, linguists and geneticists both in India and from around the world.
One hypothesis was that there were no large-scale migrations to India during the last 40,000 years or so. They also said that there were two very ancient populations, one located in north India and the other in south India and that all of today’s populations had descended from the mixing of these two groups, technically given the tags Ancestral North Indian (ANI) and Ancestral South Indian (ASI). Indo-European-language speakers who called themselves the Arya had migrated to India within the last 4000 years or so, after the Harappan Civilization started declining. The issue of ‘Arya migration’ has been a political hot button for decades, with many opposing the suggestion that the ‘Arya’ were late migrants to the country, not part of the earliest Indian population. There was the additional problem of the Harappan Civilization: if this mighty civilization which has left an indelible imprint on India preceded ‘Arya migrations’, then that cuts at the root of the right-wing position that the ‘Arya’, Sanskrit and the Vedas are the fundamental wellspring of Indian culture. I spent the following two months reading and rereading tough-to-understand genetics papers from different time periods dealing with the formation of the Indian population; trying to correlate their often contradictory findings with the state of development of population genetics when each of these papers was written; getting in touch with the authors of these papers, many of them doyens of their field with many path-breaking discoveries to their credit; and checking and double-checking the conclusions I was arriving at; and reading more and more papers. On 17 June 2017, The Hindu published my article ‘How Genetics Is Settling the Aryan Migration Debate’. Here, I explained how DNA evidence supported the theory that Indo-European-language speakers who called themselves Arya had migrated to India from central Asia around 4000 years ago. The statements made in that story were reconfirmed in March 2018 by a path-breaking paper written by ninety-two scientists from around the world, ‘The Genomic Formation of South and Central Asia’, and posted in the preprint server for biology, bioRxiv. Reich and Thangaraj were among the co-directors of the study. The scale of the study and the fact that it was based on ancient DNA made the findings far more robust and the chronology of migrations far more accurate. An updated version of the paper with even stronger DNA evidence for a migration from the central Asian Steppe was finally published on 16 September 2019 in the peer-reviewed journal Science with the title ‘The Formation of Human Populations in South and Central Asia’. This is what the summary of the paper said in its conclusion: ‘Earlier work recorded massive population movement from the Eurasian Steppe into Europe early in the third millennium bce, likely spreading Indo-European languages. We reveal a parallel series of events leading to the spread of Steppe ancestry to South Asia, thereby documenting movements of people that were likely conduits for the spread of Indo-European languages.’ On the same day, another paper based on the ancient DNA of a woman who lived in the Harappan site of Rakhigarhi about 4600 years ago was published in the peer-reviewed journal Cell, co-authored by twenty-eight scientists. The Cell paper’s title seemed straightforward enough: ‘An Ancient Harappan Genome Lacks Ancestry from Steppe Pastoralists and Iranian Farmers’. But, in fact, it required an understanding of the subject to avoid misinterpretations.
Steppe ancestry is widespread among Indian populations today and, therefore, the fact that there was no such ancestry in the Rakhigarhi DNA strongly supported the argument that the ‘Arya’ were not present during the Harappan Civilization and that their migration happened later. In fact, the paper went on to say: ‘However, a natural route for Indo-European languages to have spread into south Asia is from Eastern Europe via central Asia in the first half of the second millennium bce, a chain of transmission that did occur as has been documented in detail with ancient DNA.’ My experiences during the writing of this book have taught me that even in the most professional of settings, personal preferences can play a part in how research findings are interpreted. And often it may not be a question of bias, but a genuine belief that the truth might cause harmful side effects and, therefore, needs to be treated cautiously. For instance, there could be a fear that the fact of Steppe migrations may reinvigorate old divisions of language and region, just as there might have been a fear among some Indian historians over half a century ago that details of medieval atrocities might cause enmity between different religions. But in reality, holding back the truth cannot heal divisions. It can only cause them to fester underground with even more vigour. Also, no scientist or writer can accurately predict the consequences of a particular truth being withheld: history is made up almost entirely of unintended consequences. So the only reasonable position for any scientist, or any writer for that matter, to take is to let the facts speak, but make sure that no unsupported conclusions are drawn from them. In this case, it is true that there was large-scale migration of Indo-European-language speakers to south Asia in the second millennium bce , but it is also true that all of today’s population groups in India draw their genes from several migrations to India: there is no such thing as a ‘pure’ group, race or caste that has existed since ‘time immemorial’ (and this holds for all of the world). Of course, the degree to which the mixing between different populations has occurred differs across regions and communities. So the fact of Indo-European migrations has to be told along with the truth of multiple migrations and large-scale population mixing that happened over millennia. We are today a uniquely Indian civilization that has drawn together many population groups with different migration histories, and its impulses, culture, traditions and practices come from multiple sources, not just one singular source. In the pages that follow, we will use the new findings made possible by ancient DNA as well as the latest fascinating discoveries made by archaeologists, anthropologists, epigraphists (people who study ancient inscriptions), linguists, palaeo scientists (scholars of the geologic past) and historians to peel the layers of our ancient past one by one. It is a fascinating story and one that is rarely told. Come along. The First Indians How a band of Out of Africa migrants found their way to India, dealt with their evolutionary cousins and a range of environmental challenges, mastered new technology, made this land their own and became the largest modern human population on earth. If you want to get as close as possible to the lives of the first modern humans in India, one of the best places to go to is Bhimbetka in Madhya Pradesh’s Raisen district, about forty-five kilometres from the state capital, Bhopal.
It is an enchanting place spread over seven hills and full of naturally occurring rock shelters that are perhaps more imposing and majestic than most man-made residences of the twenty-first century. There are perennial springs, creeks and streams filled with fish; plenty of fruits, tubers and roots; deer, boar and hare; and, of course, as many quartzite rocks as you need to make all the tools you want. Moreover, the elevation of the hills makes it possible for the residents to keep track of who is approaching them: food or predator, nilgai or leopard! In the world of early humans, this must have been the equivalent of a much sought-after luxury resort. Ever since it was first occupied some 100,000 years ago, it has never lain vacant for too long, and it is easy to imagine there having been a long waiting list to get in. A place so well liked that millennia after millennia, one or the other Homo species, including our own ancestors, the Homo sapiens, lived and hunted and painted and partied there. Yes, the rock shelters are full of paintings, including some that depict people dancing to drumbeats. But do we know exactly when the first modern humans set foot in Bhimbetka or, for that matter, in India? The answer to that is a bit complex. First we need to define what we mean when we say ‘first modern humans in India’. The technical meaning of the phrase would be any individual belonging to the Homo sapiens species who set foot in India first. However, when we say ‘first modern humans in India’ we also often mean to say the earliest direct ancestors of people living in India today. It is important to know that there is a difference between the two. For example, let us say the first Homo sapiens in India were a group of thirty people in Bhimbetka 80,000 years ago. Let us also say that some calamity – like the huge Toba supervolcanic eruption that occurred in Sumatra, Indonesia, 74,000 years ago and impacted the entire region from east Asia to east Africa – directly or indirectly killed off every one of this first group of modern humans, leaving behind no one to populate the subcontinent.1 Let us then imagine a second group of modern humans in Bhimbetka around 50,000 years ago, who successfully settle down and leave behind a lineage of people still found in India. Are we referring to the second group when we say the ‘first modern humans in India’? This may look like a matter of semantics and it is so, in a way, but it has meaningful implications for us when we interpret archaeological or other evidence to understand the history of early Indians. If you ask Indian archaeologists when the first modern humans arrived in India, at least some of them are likely to put a date that is perhaps as early as 120,000 years ago. But if you ask a population geneticist, that is, a geneticist studying genetic variations within and between population groups, the answer is likely to be around 65,000 years or so ago. This seemingly irreconcilable difference between the two sciences is not necessarily contradictory. When geneticists talk about the first modern humans in India, they mean the first group of modern humans who have successfully left behind a lineage that is still around. But when archaeologists talk about the first modern humans in India, they are talking about the first group of modern humans who could have left behind archaeological evidence that can be examined today, irrespective of whether or not they have a surviving lineage. Did we really have to come from elsewhere?
What a change of heart! Modi's diplomacy at work! In an interview with CNN on Sunday, Wright said he and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent had spoken to Indian authorities about acquiring Russian oil cargoes currently waiting to be unloaded at Chinese refineries. “India has been a great partner through this. I did call up the Indians, as did Treasury Secretary (Scott) Bessent, and said there’s a whole bunch of oil floating, waiting to unload at Chinese refineries," Wright said. “Instead of having it wait six weeks to unload there, let’s just pull that oil forward, have it land in Indian refineries and tamp this fear of shortage of oil, tamp the price spikes and the concerns we see in the marketplace," he added.
China to India Shift: Approximately 18 vessels carrying Urals crude have already signaled a change in destination from China to Indian ports, providing an immediate "logistical buffer". The Economic Times
7 comments:
What a hypocrisy! LIC refused family pension for 37 years from inception. When private insurer "Oriental life" gave pension to its staff even before "Nationalisation" like GOI and SBI. LIC paid pensions on stagnant wages prevailed for 37 years with 15% family pension for 3 decades after with no hope of its revision till this day with the support of greedy and selfish In-service who enjoy more than double the real wages and double the pension treating retired staff as "Dead Wood" while it gifted tens of lakhs of crores windfall profit to GOI over and above what is invested as Capital with cumulatively 12% return PA when all PSUs and PSBs are in RED due to written off lakhs of crores of loans taken by wilful defaulters who enjoy top luxurious lives. It is called "Secular Socialism" a fundamental right inserted by a dictator during the emergency rule and implemented correctly for the past 5 decades and discriminations reduced to Zero by Gods, Govts and Elites of the Nation.
Joseph, Tony: Early Indians: The Story of Our Ancestors and Where We Came From: Juggernaut Publication: Why this book now There is a reason why this book could have been written only now, and not earlier. It is because our understanding of deep history has changed dramatically in the last one decade or so. Large stretches of our prehistory are being rewritten as we speak, based on analysis of DNA extracted from individuals who lived thousands or tens of thousands of years ago. Many ‘facts’ that we took for granted have been proved wrong, and many questions left dangling in the air as historians, archaeologists and anthropologists argued it out among themselves have been given convincing new answers – thanks to the recently acquired ability of genetic scientists to successfully extract DNA from ancient fossils and then sequence it to understand all that bound people together, or distinguished them from each other. If technology had not matured to the level it has, scientists would not have been able to make the discoveries they are making today. And if it were not for their latest findings, our prehistory would have remained as vague and contentious as earlier and this book would not have been written. Just to get a sense of the speed at which things have moved, consider this: when work on this book began a decade ago, we did not know who were the people of the Harappan Civilization or where their descendants had gone, but now we do. A decade ago, we did not know how much of our ancestry we owed to the original Out of Africa migrants who reached India about 65,000 years ago, but now we do. A decade ago, we did not know when the caste system
began, but now we can zero in on the period with a fair degree of genetic accuracy. These are just a few examples that demonstrate our rapidly improving understanding of prehistory, and not only with regard to India. Here’s a short list of things that have changed about human prehistory in other parts of the world because of ancient DNA: we now know that large portions of European populations were replaced not once but twice within the last 10,000 years. First, a mass migration of farmers from west Asia around 9000 years ago mixed with or replaced already established hunter-gatherers in Europe. And then a mass migration from the Eurasian Steppes about 5000 years ago mixed with or replaced the then existing population of European farmers. In the Americas, we now know that native American populations, before the arrival of Europeans, owed their ancestry to not one but at least three migrations from Asia. In east Asia, we know that much of the ancestry of people in the region derives from two or more major expansions of populations from the Chinese agricultural heartland. In 2010 we learned that modern humans had interbred with Neanderthals and in 2014 we learned that our ancestors had interbred with Denisovans (a member of the Homo species that was identified only because of ancient DNA sequencing) as well. When this journey began in 2012, though, I did not know that the field I was getting into, prehistory, was just about to experience an explosion of new knowledge. That is something that happened serendipitously. When I started, I was fascinated by the Harappan Civilization and the questions that were still unsettled: who were the people who built the largest civilization of their time, and where did they go? I visited Harappan sites from Dholavira and Lothal in Gujarat to Rakhigarhi in Haryana, which led me on to many meetings and email discussions with leading historians, archaeologists, epigraphists, linguists and geneticists both in India and from around the world.
One hypothesis was that there were no large-scale migrations to India during the last 40,000 years or so. They also said that there were two very ancient populations, one located in north India and the other in south India and that all of today’s populations had descended from the mixing of these two groups, technically given the tags Ancestral North Indian (ANI) and Ancestral South Indian (ASI). Indo-European-language speakers who called themselves the Arya had migrated to India within the last 4000 years or so, after the Harappan Civilization started declining. The issue of ‘Arya migration’ has been a political hot button for decades, with many opposing the suggestion that the ‘Arya’ were late migrants to the country, not part of the earliest Indian population. There was the additional problem of the Harappan Civilization: if this mighty civilization which has left an indelible imprint on India preceded ‘Arya migrations’, then that cuts at the root of the right-wing position that the ‘Arya’, Sanskrit and the Vedas are the fundamental wellspring of Indian culture. I spent the following two months reading and rereading tough-to-understand genetics papers from different time periods dealing with the formation of the Indian population; trying to correlate their often contradictory findings with the state of development of population genetics when each of these papers was written; getting in touch with the authors of these papers, many of them doyens of their field with many path-breaking discoveries to their credit; and checking and double-checking the conclusions I was arriving at; and reading more and more papers. On 17 June 2017, The Hindu published my article ‘How Genetics Is Settling the Aryan Migration Debate’. Here, I explained how DNA evidence supported the theory that Indo-European-language speakers who called themselves Arya had migrated to India from central Asia around 4000 years ago. The statements made in that story were reconfirmed in March 2018 by a path-breaking paper written by ninety-two scientists from around the world, ‘The Genomic Formation of South and Central Asia’, and posted in the preprint server for biology, bioRxiv. Reich and Thangaraj were among the co-directors of the study. The scale of the study and the fact that it was based on ancient DNA made the findings far more robust and the chronology of migrations far more accurate. An updated version of the paper with even stronger DNA evidence for a migration from the central Asian Steppe was finally published on 16 September 2019 in the peer-reviewed journal Science with the title ‘The Formation of Human Populations in South and Central Asia’. This is what the summary of the paper said in its conclusion: ‘Earlier work recorded massive population movement from the Eurasian Steppe into Europe early in the third millennium bce, likely spreading Indo-European languages. We reveal a parallel series of events leading to the spread of Steppe ancestry to South Asia, thereby documenting movements of people that were likely conduits for the spread of Indo-European languages.’ On the same day, another paper based on the ancient DNA of a woman who lived in the Harappan site of Rakhigarhi about 4600 years ago was published in the peer-reviewed journal Cell, co-authored by twenty-eight scientists. The Cell paper’s title seemed straightforward enough: ‘An Ancient Harappan Genome Lacks Ancestry from Steppe Pastoralists and Iranian Farmers’. But, in fact, it required an understanding of the subject to avoid misinterpretations.
Steppe ancestry is widespread among Indian populations today and, therefore, the fact that there was no such ancestry in the Rakhigarhi DNA strongly supported the argument that the ‘Arya’ were not present during the Harappan Civilization and that their migration happened later. In fact, the paper went on to say: ‘However, a natural route for Indo-European languages to have spread into south Asia is from Eastern Europe via central Asia in the first half of the second millennium bce, a chain of transmission that did occur as has been documented in detail with ancient DNA.’ My experiences during the writing of this book have taught me that even in the most professional of settings, personal preferences can play a part in how research findings are interpreted. And often it may not be a question of bias, but a genuine belief that the truth might cause harmful side effects and, therefore, needs to be treated cautiously. For instance, there could be a fear that the fact of Steppe migrations may reinvigorate old divisions of language and region, just as there might have been a fear among some Indian historians over half a century ago that details of medieval atrocities might cause enmity between different religions. But in reality, holding back the truth cannot heal divisions. It can only cause them to fester underground with even more vigour. Also, no scientist or writer can accurately predict the consequences of a particular truth being withheld: history is made up almost entirely of unintended consequences. So the only reasonable position for any scientist, or any writer for that matter, to take is to let the facts speak, but make sure that no unsupported conclusions are drawn from them. In this case, it is true that there was large-scale migration of Indo-European-language speakers to south Asia in the second millennium bce , but it is also true that all of today’s population groups in India draw their genes from several migrations to India: there is no such thing as a ‘pure’ group, race or caste that has existed since ‘time immemorial’ (and this holds for all of the world). Of course, the degree to which the mixing between different populations has occurred differs across regions and communities. So the fact of Indo-European migrations has to be told along with the truth of multiple migrations and large-scale population mixing that happened over millennia. We are today a uniquely Indian civilization that has drawn together many population groups with different migration histories, and its impulses, culture, traditions and practices come from multiple sources, not just one singular source. In the pages that follow, we will use the new findings made possible by ancient DNA as well as the latest fascinating discoveries made by archaeologists, anthropologists, epigraphists (people who study ancient inscriptions), linguists, palaeo scientists (scholars of the geologic past) and historians to peel the layers of our ancient past one by one. It is a fascinating story and one that is rarely told. Come along. The First Indians How a band of Out of Africa migrants found their way to India, dealt with their evolutionary cousins and a range of environmental challenges, mastered new technology, made this land their own and became the largest modern human population on earth. If you want to get as close as possible to the lives of the first modern humans in India, one of the best places to go to is Bhimbetka in Madhya Pradesh’s Raisen district, about forty-five kilometres from the state capital, Bhopal.
It is an enchanting place spread over seven hills and full of naturally occurring rock shelters that are perhaps more imposing and majestic than most man-made residences of the twenty-first century. There are perennial springs, creeks and streams filled with fish; plenty of fruits, tubers and roots; deer, boar and hare; and, of course, as many quartzite rocks as you need to make all the tools you want. Moreover, the elevation of the hills makes it possible for the residents to keep track of who is approaching them: food or predator, nilgai or leopard! In the world of early humans, this must have been the equivalent of a much sought-after luxury resort. Ever since it was first occupied some 100,000 years ago, it has never lain vacant for too long, and it is easy to imagine there having been a long waiting list to get in. A place so well liked that millennia after millennia, one or the other Homo species, including our own ancestors, the Homo sapiens, lived and hunted and painted and partied there. Yes, the rock shelters are full of paintings, including some that depict people dancing to drumbeats. But do we know exactly when the first modern humans set foot in Bhimbetka or, for that matter, in India? The answer to that is a bit complex. First we need to define what we mean when we say ‘first modern humans in India’. The technical meaning of the phrase would be any individual belonging to the Homo sapiens species who set foot in India first. However, when we say ‘first modern humans in India’ we also often mean to say the earliest direct ancestors of people living in India today. It is important to know that there is a difference between the two. For example, let us say the first Homo sapiens in India were a group of thirty people in Bhimbetka 80,000 years ago. Let us also say that some calamity – like the huge Toba supervolcanic eruption that occurred in Sumatra, Indonesia, 74,000 years ago and impacted the entire region from east Asia to east Africa – directly or indirectly killed off every one of this first group of modern humans, leaving behind no one to populate the subcontinent.1 Let us then imagine a second group of modern humans in Bhimbetka around 50,000 years ago, who successfully settle down and leave behind a lineage of people still found in India. Are we referring to the second group when we say the ‘first modern humans in India’? This may look like a matter of semantics and it is so, in a way, but it has meaningful implications for us when we interpret archaeological or other evidence to understand the history of early Indians. If you ask Indian archaeologists when the first modern humans arrived in India, at least some of them are likely to put a date that is perhaps as early as 120,000 years ago. But if you ask a population geneticist, that is, a geneticist studying genetic variations within and between population groups, the answer is likely to be around 65,000 years or so ago. This seemingly irreconcilable difference between the two sciences is not necessarily contradictory. When geneticists talk about the first modern humans in India, they mean the first group of modern humans who have successfully left behind a lineage that is still around. But when archaeologists talk about the first modern humans in India, they are talking about the first group of modern humans who could have left behind archaeological evidence that can be examined today, irrespective of whether or not they have a surviving lineage. Did we really have to come from elsewhere?
What a change of heart! Modi's diplomacy at work! In an interview with CNN on Sunday, Wright said he and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent had spoken to Indian authorities about acquiring Russian oil cargoes currently waiting to be unloaded at Chinese refineries. “India has been a great partner through this. I did call up the Indians, as did Treasury Secretary (Scott) Bessent, and said there’s a whole bunch of oil floating, waiting to unload at Chinese refineries," Wright said.
“Instead of having it wait six weeks to unload there, let’s just pull that oil forward, have it land in Indian refineries and tamp this fear of shortage of oil, tamp the price spikes and the concerns we see in the marketplace," he added.
China to India Shift: Approximately 18 vessels carrying Urals crude have already signaled a change in destination from China to Indian ports, providing an immediate "logistical buffer".
The Economic Times
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