 Hello and welcome to NewsClick. Yesterday, claims of Ram Setu being man-made were everywhere. These claims come up every couple of years and get the Hindutva Brigade excited and then they start circulating these claims. So, today we have with us Prabir Purkayasthar, Editor-in-Chief to talk about what these claims are, why they keep coming up and what is the actual science behind the Ram Setu. Welcome Prabir. So, let's start by talking about what this promo, the science channel promo actually says and you know what is the actual scientific explanation of what they are saying. Well, there are two things I think we must register in the promo. First that is of course it's a promo. They want you to see the full program and this in some sense is like clickbait for television that you make a sensational claim. So, people will want to watch the full channel whatever they're going to say which is obviously going to be much longer. Now, having said that, what is the basic thing that they are claiming which has been picked up by others. As I said, the promo is not explaining anything. It's making a certain sensational statements in order to attract eyeballs. And in this they are saying that the sand on which the rock stand which constitutes what is called the Adams Bridge or Ram Setu doesn't really matter. That the sand is younger while the stones which are on it are older. What's our ages? The sand is about 4000 years old and the stones standing on it are 7000 years old. So, this is the first anomaly they are claiming and the second thing is well the stones are rather big and it would require superhuman engineering as it were to set them over there. Therefore, are there really some kind of divine intervention and therefore the concept of the Lord Rama, a mythological figure. Though actually the Ramayana claimed it was constructed by the Vanarseda. So, it wasn't claimed that it was constructed by supernatural powers. But having said that, let's look at the first what the dates are, 4000 and 7000. Now all the Hindutva Brigade as you called them, they are saying the Ram is 1,750,000 years back. So, if they are willing to say the Ram in order for the Setu to be artificial needs to be only have gone to Sri Lanka in the current terminology. Only 4000 years back they themselves are now going back on the genealogy they came for claim for Rama. The Tretayug, Dvaaparyug and all these yugs they have talked about and the antiquity of the Aryans in India. And therefore also that this is the, shall we say the Sanskritic homeland, the Vedic homeland and it's really been there for millennia and so on. All this claims and come into question. So, they have the really the unenviable task of accepting what the science channel says and also reconciling it with their historical evidence and they keep on claiming which is really the mythologies that we have. The second part of it, the explanation seems to be rather simple that sand deposits because it is continuous wear and tear of coral reefs, other weathering action of the sea itself and that would deposit on shallow shoals which is what this is. Because this is really some continuity of structures between India and Sri Lanka and as the sea came up they went there for some parts of it to go below the sea. And this we get shown which is narrow region of the sea in that sense gets sand deposited on it. And because the weathering of the rocks the coral reefs are continuous the sand is going to be younger. Then what are the older rocks which are already there from before. So, all we are talking about is really something rather simple to explain if we exercise your common sense. But then you know this is also the way the science channel actually operates. If you have seen its other programs you will see the science channel takes up some of this mythological claims, some of this what it calls anomalies, some of it could be various shall we say things which are circulating like the abominable snowman, Yeti, the bigfoot or the lockless monster. And then creates this whole hype about it as if they are going to show us something startling and come out with yes the lockless monster exists, something similar. While at the end of it they will give a rather mundane explanation of it. If you have seen the science programs, science channels programs, it is really something which is very similar to what they did to the lockless monster. They took a picture from space which is easily available. They actually can buy this from various satellites which are circulating above the world. And then with these feeds you can create some anomalous objects that you find created by such pictures and then have a whole spin a whole show out of it. The lockless monster they claimed here is the lake in which you can see a big something which is there in the water. And then finally the very mundane explanation you know when you combine pictures which is what it really does, cameras combine pictures. You sometimes get an artifact of the image and in this particular case the vote has disappeared and what is definitely the wake and that comes up as if it's an unexplained big object. So this is really a part of image processing which is what all of these have to do in order to sell us the really attenuated sharper pictures and otherwise you would get from this what the camera is directly. This is how it always works. So I think that's the nature of television today to create something out of nothing. And we see that our union ministers are all you know promoting this promo itself to talk about their mythologies and their religious beliefs. Smriti, Rani, Piyush Goyal, Ravi Shankar Prasad. All of them have already made public responses and are very excited about this episode using just this promo. That's a very interesting exercise that periodically happens. One is of course the saying and this is what our ICHR chairman has been on record saying that our mythologies are oral history and the supersede any scientific evidence we can find. But if they get any shred of so-called scientific evidence and immediately rush to the press, rush all over, the Twitter is flooded, postcard news and other of these fake channels which specializes in really fake news they immediately come and say oh here is the proof. So science is only accepted if it supports their mythologies. Otherwise mythologies supersede science is the position to take. But it is really startling to see union ministers, very senior ministers of that once you have named rushed to the press saying it proves everything because the science channel has said so. Without the elementary precaution of checking up what the science channel is all about, how do they treat news and have they really said what they're claiming it has said. It's not that scientists have said it quote-unquote scientists. It's a Twitter message the science channel has put out only to draw eyeballs. And of course the media response to it as you said was also very interesting. They were feeding into this frenzy times now had this whole 15 minute long segment where they were using these claims and then ultimately blaming the UPA government like how could the UPA government say all of this. So what do you say about the media response? Well I think media owes to its readers, its viewers something more than what they're doing. If we look at the sequence of it today as you know is the Gujarat elections. So anything to beat the UPA with day could be argued was the times now on the Republic TV's day. It didn't matter what it was. In this particular case it was a science channel saying something. The chief editor of times now going in his for our Ornop style, the angry Ornop style which he seems to have popularized and going on and on about science has said, science has said. No it was science channel. I was wondering why was he getting so excited about it till it came to the crucial part. UPA bashing. Now one day before the elections in Gujarat you were doing UPA bashing. The intent was really to help the BJP as much as you can which seems to be the agenda of both times now on the Republic TV. Every day their primary task seems to be meeting the opposition on some issue or the other. But I think we are being inserved by the media who in competition with each other are trying to sensationalize non-news as news and not willing to do preliminary checks. Asking even some geologist in the country what does it really mean? Does this 4,000, 7,000 years have any alternative explanation? Is it possible that it could still be not a manmade structure but a natural structure? So elementary precautions are not taken. News click is nowhere in this, shall we say in this league. But before we went in to critique what was happening we actually did some due diligence, minimal time that it takes to do it. We talked to some people, we looked at what the science channel is but why these big channels don't do it is an important question. Yeah and as I said they should have consulted geologists because there are actual scientific papers already out on this Ram Seto and how it came to be. So thank you Praveer for joining us and that's all the time we have today. Thank you for watching News Click.