Whenever my colleagues are in a group conversation, they talk about world affairs and finance, and politics.

Excuse yourself.

Take it slow, find areas of world affairs and finance and politics that you are interested about and find your niche area to develop your opinions about it; otherwise you can always read more on what experts say to then echo out their opinions during your conversations

Since you're saying this I assume there's a need to contribute for whatever reason, which should be the impetus if you are going to have to devote energy into learning the relevant information

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I am part of a research group and when I joined, I barely understood what's going on, let alone made useful comments. However whenever I listened I took notes and read up on whatever was relevant to the conversation that day. After some weeks I gradually understood more and more about what they're talking about and am able to ask questions and make some comments.

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I think it's completely fine to accept that you don't get anything cos that means you're surrounded by people more knowledgeable than yourself and so you should be glad that you're able to learn, at the same time if you consistently put in effort into taking notes and reading up more there will come a time when things become more clear. After all, there's a lot of new information everyday, but the principles are always few. Once you get the principles you will generally get the gist of the conversation, from then on it's just whether you're thinking enough about it to have some ideas that others don't

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P.s. Be brave and ask questions! That shows you're interested and people might be kind enough to explain more things to you, helping you learn and catch up with the information

No other groups to join or 'same channel' groups?