What is the deal with numbers?

First there was 9/11, 7/7, then our 26/11 and now what the newspapers are calling 3/3- the last one referring to the attack on the Sri Lankan cricket team in Lahore. The shame of the sports world has been cloaked in a bunch of numbers and along with the rest of the dates will slowly become a chapter in the history of global terrorism. One day Fox History and Entertainment will make a documentary on it and that will be it.

So what is this strange obsession we have with numbers? Does labeling such incomprehensible and senseless acts of terror with dates make it easier to get our arms around them? Is this bunch of numbers our way of giving some form to a beast that has no face and no definite shape? Maybe. But certainly it would seem that numbers are an obsession with a media looking to create catchy tag lines.

Similarly statisticians have also used or rather exploited numbers to tell us all sorts of “truths” and “discoveries”. “Indian firms spend a mere 3.4% of sales revenue to advertise”- says a headline from this morning’s edition of the “Mint”. It goes on to espouse how India is a nation which is under-branded with not enough advertising. This statement is based on some global benchmark of how typically European and US companies spend close to 6% of revenues on brand building But no one is questioning the relevance of this bench mark to India. Here most products and services still come from the unorganized sector . And word of mouth and the product’s performance are still the best way to ensure success. But don’t take my word for it. To prove this let us take an example of the icon of the western world- Google.

If anyone reading this can has com across an instance of where Google advertised that it is the “best” or the “fastest” or “most relevant” search engine, please share it with me. How much ever Yahoo, MSN may “advertise” most of the world will still use Google because it works. No ad-spend as percentage of revenue is needed to tell us that.