The Right Perspective

Dragon’s ‘Wag the Dog’ Moment     While it is expected of Chinese media to ignore and distort Hong Kong protests, Indian media’s silence on the issue is puzzling     While most modern states, democratic or otherwise, use some sort of reasonable disinformation, communist and other despotic regimes are notorious for propaganda and information manipulation. Chinese government headed by the Communist Party too is propagandist no less.   It has been months (since March 2019) when anti-government protests in Hong Kong (HK) first broke out. HK was a British colony acquired on a hundred-year lease until 1997 when its territorial sovereignty was restored to the People’s Republic of China.   The spate of protests was sparked off as a reaction to a proposed extradition bill that would have expanded the range of countries where suspected offenders may be extradited to Mainland China. Fearing political persecution given the history of human rights violation is

Decoding Bias   The cover page of ‘The Wall Street Journal’ ,  Screen shots of the websites of ‘BBC’ and ‘New York Times’ after the abrogation of Article 370       While the impact of the abrogation of Article 370 will be judged in both near and distant future, its reaction in the Western media has been despondent and biased Avatans Kumar   Traditionally, the Western media as the beacon of the free democratic world has been known for its freedom and objectivity. This reputation, however, has come under increasing strain in the recent past and it is nowhere more visible than in its coverage of news related to India in general and Hindus in particular. The coverage of Kashmir in Western media in light of the new developments is not an exception.    It is generally believed that the foreign news coverage in a country, by and large, tends to follow the foreign policy of the home country. Domestic media, in general, also give significant coverage to those fore

An Ancient Harappan Genome Lacks Ancestry from Steppe Pastoralists or Iranian Farmers Here are my quick thoughts on the recently published genomic study from Rakhigarhi. “An Ancient Harappan genome lacks ancestry from Steppe pastoralists or Iranian farmers,” finds this genome study. It signals a paradigm shift, however, many will argue just a vindication. 1/n https://t.co/ONPKnVgQuA — Avatans Kumar (@avatans) September 6, 2019 “An Ancient Harappan genome lacks ancestry from Steppe pastoralists or Iranian farmers,” finds this genome study. It signals a paradigm shift, however, many will argue just a vindication.  This genome study has far reaching consequences in epistemology. It busts ‘Aryan’ myth and proves that the Indian subcontinental population has no detectable ancestry from Steppe pastoralists or from Anatolian and Iranian farmers. The study conversely suggests that the so-called ‘Aryan’ group is probably a descendant of a South East Asian group m