Numbers numbers everywhere!

Who invented these numbers? They have been sources of worry for us ever since we were born. Imagine a hospital labor room; the first-timer daddy is totally nervous and walking up and down the corridor while his wifey dear is screaming her lungs out in the deep scary room. He waits patiently not letting the banshee screams get to him. Then the door swings open and the weary looking doctor comes out with a smile. "Congratulations! You have a son! He's 3.3 kg!" Ah, the relief! Then comes the stressful reports, birth certificates, noting the time of birth, the day of birth, etc.

His age is counted in days, then weeks, then months and finally after 12 months, the 1st birthday finally arrives!! Where relatives and family members may give nice little toys or jewellery for the young toddler, the more hopeless gifters like me stick to money: Rs. 101 (or a bit more if they are not as broke as I am :D). The years add up and the kid joins preschool. Games and frolic keep him safely away from the scary world of digits for some time. But then he joins school and his affair with numbers starts.

He's taught 1 to 10. Then 11 to 100. Then lakhs and crores, millions and billions. He's given those nice notebooks with squares to write and practice his numbers. He learns to add them, subtract them, multiply and divide them. Some kids start detesting numbers right at this stage itself. Thankfully he didn't. All through the school life, maths was a compulsory subject. He cannot ever get away from numbers, can he? As his classes go advanced, he sees them everywhere; the question papers have been numbered with questions. If he screws up the question number on his answer sheet, the whole of it goes unchecked! And yeah the MARKS too. That is another story. 33 marks is a pass grade. So for the subjects he's not very confident at, 33 is all he needs to get, for the subjects he's good at he aims for more marks. Numbers again. Everywhere. He gets good marks, he gets a good score, and he gets a higher percentage 89% 90% 93% wow.

He gets into high school. He has a good relation with numbers, he thinks he will go in for the Science stream. Study a bit more of maths and physics. Derivations walk into his life, so do differentiation and integration. He learns how numbers and alphabets have an old relation: e had its own value as did Φ. He learns how the first thing he was taught in maths that 1+1 =2 stood null and void in physics now when he studied 1+1=1! He studied how "k"=1.3806503 × 10^(-23), R=8.3145 J/mol K any many more that he was supposed to memorize. He never thought he could define the root of a negative number but he learns that i² = -1. Baffling!!

He finishes school, and now it is time to get into college. He works hard for the exams, and he has the numbers on his grade sheet to apply for colleges near and far. Some tell him, "Oh you have 96%? Sorry, its way below our college cut off", and the poor boy curses his numbers. If he would have worked harder, maybe he could have got 97% or 98%. Oh the agony! He appears for the competitive exams. Marks the bubbles in front of each question number. The results come out and his state rank and all India rank are flashed. He counts how many digits are in those numbers; the lesser the digits the better. Oh he has a four digit rank, hmmm, will that be enough to get into the college he wants? Maybe, maybe not. And even if he does have the rank, will someone else beat him to it? Numbers, numbers everywhere. Deciding his fate at every point of time.

So he joins an ok kind of engineering college. He's sad because his four digit rank made him choose that particular college. If he had a three digit rank, he could have ended up somewhere better. So he starts college. Practicals, internals, sessionals, GPAs, SGPAs. CGPAs. He's back where he started. Numbers everywhere, sometimes satisfying, sometimes embarrassing. "Oh you got 8.9 gpa?? Treat!!!" or at another time "7.2??!!!!! Dude, you were like a topper, what happened to you man? Try harder next time." Numbers eat up his life. They are the benchmark for performance. 

He is tagged fresher or 1st year, then 2nd year, 3rd year and Final year student. He sits for companies to get a job. It’s all the same things he sees going around him. They ask him quants in the written, data sufficiency, data interpretation, puzzles... He sits in the conference hall, waiting for the results to be announced depending on a cut off, depending on a NUMBER. A number which would decide whether he is good enough to work for a company or not. 

He gets through! Oh he's elated. His relatives back home ask "But hey what about the package? It's giving only 3.4 lakhs p.a.??!! Maybe you should wait for a nicer company, boy." He finally gets the dream job he always wanted. It is a CMMI level 5 company. Level 4 or level 3 isn't that good. Level 5 is the best. He's getting a great package too. It is 4. 4 lakhs p.a. wow!! Everyone is happy. They are all cheering for his efforts. Phone calls start pouring in at his home, people are congratulating his parents. This is such a happy day. 

He graduates and joins his job. He gets completely absorbed into his 9to5 schedule. More numbers enamour him: productivity, matrices, turnaround time, bug fixes, number of service requests. The hours drag on from 5 to 6, from 6 to 7, from 7 to… Schedules merge into a blurry apparition. Two years down the line, he decides to get out of the rut he is sunk in. He consults his older cousins and realises they are doing much better professionally as managers. He decides to change track and pursue an MBA instead. Hell, why not? It fetches better salary!

All said and done, he still needs to crack the myriad entrance exams. CAT, GMAT, SNAP, XAT… the list seems endless. He’s back to number crunching, data analysis, memorizing tables, cubes and square roots and what not. Just to get 99.99 %ile to secure an entry into top B-Schools. He gets into the preparation mode, gives in hours together. His exams go well, he gets into a good B-School and the process of score cards and gpa starts all over again.

Indians are among the most competitive students in the world. It hardly comes as a surprise if one stops to analyse the amount of importance the Indian Education System places on numbers. From the time we begin our academic pursuit to the never ending quest of finding our place in the society (personally and professionally), our lives seem to be overtly burdened by the weight of getting good grades. It’s no wonder many of us lose the focus of what is paramount, in the process of chasing numbers – learning. The need of the hour is to challenge this obsession of quantitative performance and start welcoming qualitative learning instead, so that numbers stop stalking the students of tomorrow.

Hmmm... seeing the cumbersome association with numbers, I wonder if reading Shakespeare would have been a better option.

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Smita Mishra is an intern with The Potter's Earth.

A creative nerd, Smita loves to dabble into a number of interests ranging from writing poetry to photography to graphic designing to (the list is long). An engineer by qualification, she's currently pursuing her MBA and hopes to start her own business someday.