South Asian nations

My intuition is that the Physicians graph has the population density confounder. The higher the % of population living in dense cities, the lower the physicians / 1k people metric (scale efficiency).

On the West Bengal thing, I found out a while back that this dude I thought was Bengali(Bangladesh) was actually from India lol I was so surprised because his mom and my parents were friends and stuff growing up cuz we lived in the same area. He looks pretty Bangladeshi, not Indian, tbh

It really depends on the class. I don’t expect Indian Bengali descendants of the Zamindars of East Bengal to have a particularly favourable view of us lmaooo

As stated at the beginning of the article, by a combination of political geographies and the application of the dictum “the average represents no-one”, we tend to gloss over the best and worst performing regions in South Asia (Akhand Bharat).

There are three outstanding health, mortality and maternal indicator zones – (Kerala+TN+Sri Lanka), the NorthEast and a zone in the Lower Himalayas consisting of Himachal, Uttarakhand and Punjab.

The worst performers are the Gangetic continuum (including Bangladesh) and the NorthWest (Pakistan).

The zone of (Kerala+TN+Sri Lanka) is head and shoulders above every other region on HDI and health indicators. Chennai is THE medical tourism destination for Asia and Africa – the very first Public Health Act was passed in the erstwhile Madras State.

The basic sanitation numbers above are surprising.

I see other desis throwing shade, but India seems to have caught up.

@bhimrao – general perception tends to lag behind reality. Many people still think the world is headed into an Malthusian trap with an endless increase in population .

“Bhimrao
>The love Indians have for India is qualitatively different from the way Pakistanis love Pakistan. This shows in how both countries mourn their partitions

Indeed, Pakistanis don’t mourn 1971, because there is very little in common between Pakistan and Bangladesh save for Islam – and for both sets of population, Islam is more of an identity than a religion (this is historical baggage from the times when people lived with Hindus).

Indians seem to apparently mourn losing it’s fair colored population. Otherwise they would have integrated Bangladesh back into India in 1971. I didn’t believe in all these theories about skin color but subconsciously they are true. Large part of the Indian population thinks like this.
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Pakistan army has both united and divided Pakistan. I think the usefulness of their autocratic ways is now over. They have played their part in directing the formation of a Pakistani identity, now their interference is just harming the country.

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TTP carrying out lone wold attacks against frontier policeman is just a minor nuisance in the grand scheme of things. The future of Afghanistan looks bleak, and ISI has enough leverage to make it even bleaker if the Taliban don’t play ball. Already their are rumors of rifts between the Taliban’s Kandahari faction and the Haqqani faction over the recent women education/work ban. Also, ISIS is always knocking and Pajshiris can also be employed. I don’t worry about the western borders much, only worry is if generals are busy playing game of thrones in Pakistan and their attention is diverted from security.

Development is a harder game in India compared to Bangladesh. Having a robust “civil society” (in other words, hordes of rabid NIMBY activists), strong organized labor (which prevents poor wages and working conditions required to attract investors), and a lot of political energy going into sorting out centuries-old blood feuds mean not much is left for development.

I would not be surprised to see us lag behind them until the 2100s or so. That does not make me happy, but I recognize that we have a harder burden to bear than most, so I do not worry with comparisons to Bangladesh or Vietnam that come up regularly on Twitter.

GDP numbers dont give the full picture. a lot depends on the general feel of the country. by and large, india is the best place to live in if the choice is limited to south asia.

the small civil liberties we take for granted in india are not universally available in south asia. one needs to be able to relax with a beer in the evening after a hard day of work. one needs to be able to vent off against one and sundry – politicians included – without having to look over one’s shoulders. you can’t do these things in pak and bangla. and the excessive religiosity in pak is added suffocation. you can literally get lynched for accidently tearing up a wrong piece of paper.

i used to like sri-lankans. i thought they were pretty chilled, till they surrounded 40,000 civilians who were caught up in the war, and murdered them all. they are plain bastards for me since then.

‘This is incorrect. These were always separate languages historically. Infact it was only after the independence of India that they were classfied as Hindi. If you are awadhi and your ancestors were rural, its likely that Hindi/Urdu is not your mother tongue. Khariboli dialect spawned Hindi/Urdu.. and it’s quite western shifted.’

This is just not correct. You talk as if I grew up in US and have to win debates to prove what is obvious. The simplest counter examples are Ram Charitmas and Hanuman Chalisa are in Awadhi from 1500s. It is basically Hindi, not very different from how it is spoken today. Awadhi, Maithili, Brajbhasha, Bhojpuri,… are all dialects of Hindi. I don’t get the Bengali Gaudiya Vaishnav aaratis, and I accept Bengali as a separate language.

Punjabi or Sindhi are not dialects of Urdu.

Made some synthetic coodinates with one of my friend’s admixture results from k23 (he’s from Rangpur) and ran the coords on Vahaduo. The NE:SE Asian ratio was similar to mine, at 5:1. It seems like the Tibeto-Burman in us Rangpur folks was mediated through groups like the Naxi, who also score a 5:1 ratio in the NE:SE Asian thing, from the results I have seen.

Or it could be a multilayered mix but I think ratios do matter here.

For the Bengalis curious, use the VNM Dong Son samples and the CHN Yellow River samples to find out your breakdowns. VNM Dong Son represents SE Asian related ancestry while CHN Yellow River represents Northern Asian ancestry.

At first I thought it was Tibetan, but Tibetans would score far less SE Asian than me and my buddy. Or it could be TIbetan and part of my SE-Asian is just AASI related.

Also yeah Bengali Brahmins look veeeeery different from us Bengali Muslims and those non Brahmin non-Dalit Bengalis. Kishore Kumar was a Bengali Brahmin and I swear I’ve never seen that phenotype in us, ever.

If you’ve grown up thinking that all of them are generic Bengalis even the Brahmins then you’ll say “oh yeah tons of Bengalis look like that” but those “tons” will just be Bengali Brahmins and not much of non-Brahmins.

It’s the additional Steppe and IVC ancestry they (BengaliBrahmins) have that we (BengaliMuslims/generic) lack, it does show.

In general ofc this is a rule of thumb not an absolute law like most things. Mamata Banerjee is probably the exception, apparently her mother’s maiden name was Gayatri Devi.

WSJ: Ancient DNA Paints a New Picture of the Viking Age
A study of nearly 300 ancient Scandinavian genomes reveals sources of Vikings’ genetic ancestry

Some DNA samples were obtained from human remains in the wreckage of a warship that sank off Sweden in 1676.
PHOTO: LARS EINARSSON
By Aylin WoodwardFollow
Jan. 5, 2023 11:00 am ET

Bones and teeth of ancient Scandinavians excavated from burials, a sunken warship and the sites of a violent massacre have helped an international group of scientists craft an unprecedented picture of the region’s storied Viking culture.

The researchers looked at ancient DNA spanning 2,000 years of Scandinavian history from such remains to piece together a comprehensive look at the movement of peoples into the region during the Viking Age, more than a millennium ago. These genomes are among new means to understand and explore the Vikings’s history and legacy.

The findings, published Thursday in the peer-reviewed journal Cell, revealed that a surge of people coming into Scandinavia from the British-Irish isles and the eastern Baltic region introduced new genetic information into the Viking population between about the years 750 and 1,099—around the height of the Norsemen’s dynamic era of conquest.

“The so-called Viking Age has always been understood as a time of movement, but the ways in which this has been understood have changed,” said Neil Price, an Uppsala University professor of archaeology who wasn’t involved in the research. “We used to speak of a ‘Viking expansion,’ in which the ancient Scandinavians somehow pushed out into the wider world in search of portable wealth, trading contacts, and lands to settle.”

Yet genetic studies such as this one, Dr. Price said, help demonstrate that “this was a world of movement in all directions—into Scandinavia as well as out of it.”

Archaeological work at Sandby borg, a circular fortified settlement on the Swedish island of Oland.

One of the best explanations for the new findings was that the Vikings raided regions around Scandinavia in part to acquire slaves, according to Mark Collard, an evolutionary anthropologist at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia who wasn’t involved in the study.

“It is clear from archaeological artifacts and historical documents that they also took captives,” he said, adding that the new study suggests the number of slaves brought back to Scandinavia by the Vikings was enough to influence genetic composition of the region.

The study revealed, too, that primarily females were moved into Scandinavia from the east during this time—which “suggests that the Vikings may have preferentially targeted women and girls as slaves,” Dr. Collard said.

Some of the people coming into Scandinavia may have also been Christian missionaries or monks who voluntarily immigrated, as well as diplomats and traders, according to Anders Götherström, a co-author of the new study and professor of molecular archaeology at Stockholm University.

But these newcomers to Scandinavia didn’t flourish, the genetic analysis showed. Dr. Götherström’s team looked at nearly 300 ancient genomes from individuals who died between the beginning of the first century to the mid-19th century and were discovered in archaeological sites and graves across Sweden and Norway. They then compared those genomes to genetic data from more than 16,600 individuals currently living in Sweden, Norway and Denmark.

The researchers found that, following the Viking Age, there was a notable decline in Baltic and British-Irish ancestries among Scandinavians. While there remains some genetic influence from these regions today, it is “not as much as we would expect,” Dr. Götherström said.

“The only credible way I can explain that is a lot of these people that came into Scandinavia during the Viking period didn’t build families and weren’t as efficient in getting children as the people who were already living there,” he added.

While ancient DNA is crucial to generating a clearer picture of a region’s history, teeth and bones containing such genetic information are limited. Finding such remains that date to the early Viking era is tricky, as cremation was the common burial tradition in Scandinavia at that time, according to Dr. Götherström.

“So every burial where we’re getting DNA is deviating from what was common,” he said, adding that he believes his team’s analysis is still “getting the bigger picture correct” because of the large number of genomes involved.

The study’s conclusions need to be tempered by the idea that these 300 ancient genomes may not be wholly representative of the region’s overall population, according to Ellen Christine Røyrvik, a geneticist at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health who wasn’t involved in the research.

Many of the genomes used in the new analysis were collected from individuals uncovered in burial grounds, grave fields and churchyards. But some samples came from people who died in unusual circumstances—including sailors from a Swedish warship that sank off the country’s southeastern coast in 1676, and inhabitants of a settlement known as Sandby borg who were likely massacred during an organized attack in the fifth century.

“There is a question of how much you can call it population genomics as opposed to kind of lots of little vignettes,” Dr. Røyrvik said.

Write to Aylin Woodward at aylin.woodward@wsj.com