My DNA; What We Share
A new piece; an earlier take is here: My DNA; Diversity and Identity.
My daughter Nitya paid about 120 Canadian dollars some years ago and ordered a DNA kit for me from 23andMe. The company does not ship kits to India, or I might have gifted one to an uncle, sister or a nephew just to compare notes around the family table. One spit tube later, a report arrived on my screen. Among the matches, it also recognised a niece, Shreya Chand, my sister’s daughter. We share DNA that came down from my parents, her grandparents. Science confirming what the family already knew.
Most of my DNA matches people from northern India and Pakistan — about 96 percent, with Punjab showing up — plus small traces from Bengal and the Northeast, southern India and Sri Lanka, and a thin European strand. My mother’s line is haplogroup M5b2 and my father’s is R-Y7: old South Asian family branches, not a passport stamp.
Most of our DNA gets shuffled every generation, like a deck of cards. The haplogroup lines do not. They pass down almost unchanged, mother to child and father to son, over thousands of years. My mother’s line, M5b2, is among the old lines of South Asia, here long before farming or cities. My father’s line, R-Y7, came later, tied to Bronze Age movements from Central Asia into North India. So I am a small meeting point of very old and newer arrivals, which is true of most of us. We carry our ancestors not only in family stories and faded photos, but in the cells that keep our hearts beating.
My DNA report from one spit tube!
A few plain words
- Cell — the tiny building block of the body.
- DNA — the instruction book inside nearly every cell.
- Genes — short stretches of that book; recipes for flesh, bone, blood, and brain.
- Haplogroup — a deep family branch on the mother’s line or the father’s line, going back many generations.
- Ancestry percentages — the company’s best guess of which regions your small differences most resemble. Shades on a shared canvas, not different species.
Under the labels we argue about — Indian or Pakistani, this religion or that, this caste or the other — the material of the body is largely the same. Any two people share about 99.9 percent of their DNA. The remaining fraction carries some regional history. It does not invent nations, faiths, or castes. Those are stories people built on top of biology. Genes vary a little; borders and labels are drawn on paper.
I mention my own report not to claim a special pedigree. If anything, it says the opposite. Borders, castes, religions, and nationalities arrived later. Genes did not wait for them.
A Pakistani physicist and educator, Pervez Hoodbhoy, once remarked that some who call themselves Syeds and trace their line to Arabia might be surprised by a DNA test. I leave that thought there. My own numbers already sit across the India–Pakistan line without asking my permission.
So when we speak of identity, we are mostly talking about stories we tell and roles we play. I am a son, a brother, a husband, once a breadwinner, now retired. Those words are useful. They are also man-made.
Why then do we cling so hard to group labels? Part of it is belonging. Part of it is ego — the comfort of “we” against “they.” Leaders have always known that to gather followers and keep power, it helps to draw a sharp line around an identity. Divide, name, rule — an old method. DNA does not bless it.
Had the Creator not given humans a mind to think and remember, and a heart to feel, what would the world be like? We might still have bodies of shared stuff — but without memory of kinship, without the ache of another’s pain, the urge to draw a line or to erase one would look very different.
I am not a scientist. I am an old man looking at a colourful map of percentages and asking a plain question: if our biology is this continuous, why do we invent so many reasons to stand apart?
The kit cost 120 Canadian dollars. Scaling that to every Indian would be a foolish fortune. We do not need a billion spit tubes to notice what one report already hints at. We are more alike than our labels allow. Can we live by that? The hopeful will say yes, the hard-headed will say never. What will actually happen remains unknown, and may stay so. But the rest is story — and story, unlike DNA, we can rewrite.
Acknowledgements: My thanks to my daughter Nitya for the 23andMe kit, and to 23andMe for the reports and screenshots used here. This piece was put together with the help of Grok AI and Google searches; the featured image was made with Grok Imagine, and the card-shuffle diagram was drawn with AI help. But the thought the message I wanted to share is mine.