What it actually takes to make one lakh

0:00Here is a number. One lakh. Written down it is a one, followed by five zeros. Now here is a question that sounds simple and is not. Is that a big number? Before you answer, notice that you cannot. Not yet. Because big is not something a number is. Big is something a number is, compared to something else. By the end of this you will have seen a lakh look enormous, and seen the same lakh look small, and both times the arithmetic will be honest.

0:36Let's build one, starting somewhere you already know. The largest three digit number is nine hundred and ninety nine. Add one, and something has to give. Every digit is already as big as it goes. So the whole thing rolls over, and you get one thousand. The smallest four digit number. Do it again. The largest four digit number is nine thousand nine hundred and ninety nine. Add one, and it rolls over to ten thousand.

1:07One more time. The largest five digit number is ninety nine thousand nine hundred and ninety nine. Add one, and you land on a lakh. Three steps, and each one is the same step. Fill a place up, and the next place begins. Watch that last moment closely, because it is the only interesting one. Ninety nine thousand nine hundred and ninety five. Ninety six. Ninety seven. Ninety eight. Ninety nine.

1:40And then. Every one of those was five digits long. The next one is six. That is what a lakh is, before it is anything else. It is where a sixth digit becomes necessary. Nothing dramatic happened to the counting. We added one, the way we had all along. The drama is in the writing, not in the number. Now let's make it something you can feel. Suppose there were a lakh of different kinds of rice, and you set out to taste them. One a day.

2:14Take a year as three hundred and sixty five days, and take a life as a hundred years. That gives you thirty six thousand five hundred days to work with. Every single day of a hundred years. At one a day, you finish thirty six thousand five hundred of them. That is nowhere near a lakh. You would need most of three lifetimes. So try two a day. Seventy three thousand.

2:41Still short. Still not there. Now three a day. And here is where it gets interesting. Three a day, for a hundred years, is one lakh nine thousand five hundred. You clear it. With nine and a half thousand to spare. Read that again, because it is easy to miss. One a day gets nowhere near. Three a day gets there comfortably. Your instinct says that if one is hopeless, three is hopeless too. Your instinct is wrong.

3:14Here is another way to hold it. There is a market town, and about fifteen years ago somebody counted the people living in it. The count came out at roughly seventy five thousand. That is not a lakh. It is twenty five thousand short of one. Which means that if the town were a third again as large, everybody in it would be one lakh people. Now count again, more recently. About one lakh six thousand.

3:44The town has crossed the line. It is six thousand people over. Thirty one thousand more people, across those years. So a lakh, for this town, is not a huge number or a small one. It is roughly the size of the town. Let's try the trick that does most of the work. Measure the thing you do not know against the thing you do. Here is a boy, one metre tall. You know how tall that is.

4:13Here is a floor of a building, and it is about four times his height. Four metres. Stack ten of those floors and you have a building forty metres high. Now bring in a statue. A very tall one, about a hundred and eighty metres. Against the building, that is a hundred and forty metres taller. The statue is about four and a half times the building, so calling it four times is close, and only close.

4:42And now a waterfall. Four hundred and fifty metres. Four hundred and ten metres above the top of the building. How many floors would you need to reach the top of it? A hundred and thirteen. Notice what just happened. You do not know a waterfall. But you know a boy, and every step from him to the waterfall was a small one. So. Is a lakh big? Here are three reasons to say yes, and they are good ones.

5:13There were once about a lakh different kinds of rice grown across one country. A lakh distinct varieties of a single crop. A lakh days is two hundred and seventy four years. Nobody has ever lived a lakh days, and nobody is close. And a lakh people, standing shoulder to shoulder, would form a line about thirty eight kilometres long. That last one is worth checking, because it sounds made up. Thirty eight kilometres shared between a lakh people is thirty eight centimetres each.

5:49That is about the width of a person's shoulders. So the number is right. Three good arguments. A lakh is enormous. Now here are three reasons to say no, and they are just as good. There is a cricket stadium that seats more than a lakh people. They arrive, they sit down, they all see the same match. A single human head carries somewhere between eighty thousand and one lakh twenty thousand hairs.

6:20So a lakh of something can sit on top of one person's head, and nobody thinks of it as a lot of hair. And some fish lay close to a lakh eggs at a time. Some lay tens of lakhs. For those fish, a lakh is an ordinary afternoon. Three good arguments, using the same number. A lakh is not much at all. Both sets of arguments are correct. Neither one is a trick.

6:49So which is it? Is a lakh big or small? The question has no answer, and that is not a disappointment. It is the finding. A lakh days is a long time because a life is short. A lakh hairs is unremarkable because a head is covered in them. In each case the number did not change. What changed was what we set it beside. So size is not a property a number carries around with it. It is a statement about a comparison.

7:22Which means the skill worth having is not being impressed by digits. It is choosing what to compare against. Ask big compared to what, and every one of those six arguments becomes obvious instead of confusing. One practical thing before we finish, because you will need to write these down. In the Indian system, you put a comma after the thousands, and then another one every two digits going left.

7:54So a lakh is written one, comma, zero zero, comma, zero zero zero. Take a bigger one. Twelve lakh seventy eight thousand eight hundred and thirty. The commas are doing real work. The last group of three is the thousands. The group before it is the lakhs. That is why the number is read the way it is. The comma tells you where the naming changes. Try a longer one. Fifty lakh five thousand and fifty.

8:25Five zero, comma, zero five, comma, zero five zero. Those zeros in the middle matter. They hold places open. So a lakh is a one with five zeros, and it is the point at which you need a sixth digit. It is three tastings a day for a hundred years. It is the population of a market town. It is more days than anyone has lived, and it is fewer hairs than some people have on their head.

8:56All of those are true at once. Here is what I would like you to take away, and it is not a fact about a lakh. When somebody hands you a number and tells you it is large, the useful question is not whether they are right. The useful question is: large next to what? Pick a number you have met this week. A price, a distance, a crowd. Now find something to set it beside that makes it feel enormous, and then find something that makes it feel small.

9:29Both will exist. That is the whole point.