News or exams, why numbers today don't add up

Reading news is often a traumatic affair. The headlines convey a sense of outrage, even scandal but the report itself is usually a half-inch column, a list of numbers. Whether it is murder, suicide or rape, one lists them out like statistics. Number seems to cover data but almost like a cover up.

The great events of the time have little analysis of what happens. They are no human interest stories, no sense of lived reality. Numbers almost destroy story. Look at the statistics. 3000 die in Andhra Pradesh heat. 12,000 farmers commit suicide. 500 displaced by riots in UP. The act of naming is now replaced by number but number conveys little. Number needs a sensorium, where one can touch, smell, taste a reality. Number can literally numb a people.

Bhopal disaster

In fact, this is what happened in Bhopal, in 1984. All of us talked of the world’s greatest industrial disaster but we were all in awe, even secretly proud of the number, in fact possessive about it. Sadly, the everydayness of suffering, the damage to the eye, the loss of work and sexuality, the lives of suffering faded out before the abstractness of number. Number as quantity, unless contextualised and properly interpreted, fails to tell a story.

There is a psychology to number which demands size and scale for attention. It is like one has to be a large success or colossal failure be news. News ignores the average, the normal. Ordinary people living out mundane ordinary lives do not command attention.

Only success is newsworthy. In fact, our politicians seem to highlight this need for a particular kind of attention. Narendra Modi sets the tone for an aspiring class which overvalues success by congratulating all those who were successful in the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) examination. Examinations are the Olympics, the great moral battles of our lives and a first class is immortal. I only wish Modi had a few kind words for those students who may not have done well. Why do averages and failure become zeros of history?

I remember such an attitude came out with a certain poignancy a few decades ago, when a group of us were discussing results at the Delhi School of Economics, boasting at the number of first divisions. We are talking in a flat in Calcutta, where one of the mothers was serving tea quietly. There was a gentleness about her. Yet this woman suddenly sparked up in anger and sadness and asked, "Is Delhi school only about first divisions? What about those who do not do well? Don’t they have lives, families? Is success the only important definition of life?" We were surprised, shocked but we learnt a lesson about the arrogance of number as an idea of success. It fails to understand life as a process of trial and error, give and take. Ordinary lives sometimes show courage, sanity in a quiet unstated way that they disappear into the anonymity of a mass society.

Source of insight

I am not denying that number can be a source of insight and for a mathematician contain a sense of poetics. But that sense of number needs a numeracy which most journalists and social scientists do not have. In fact, it is this fascination or more fetishisation of number which can banalise a problem. One talks of ten million displaced by riots in the history of India or the thousands of foetuses killed for reasons of gender. Number does not explain the phenomenon. We need a different language to talk of suffering, distress or pain.

This problem is caught by a new genre of reports titled the Human Development Report (HDR), a follow up on the drier UN reports on development, poverty or literacy. It is these reports produced by global bureaucracies which trigger bland news like, "India, the hungriest nation in the world."

Reading these reports one realises the desperate attempt to humanise the story. The narrative which is an array of statistics will suddenly produce a colourful box in pink, green or orange which lists out a success story.

What I am trying to suggest is that number, instead of establishing connections, atomises our perception of society. Instead of creating horror, genocide statistics banalise the violence of our society. What does it mean in terms of suffering to say that Mao killed ten million, Stalin, 12 million, and Hitler six million? When we hear that the Cambodian dictator Pol Pot eliminated three-and-a-half million people we almost turn competitive wondering what would have happened if Pol Pot had lasted longer? Today extinctions of species and genocides are taking place and yet they rarely trouble citizens, who dismiss numbers with indifference as a message from a distant accounting sheet.

Controversy

One sensed the same controversy when the now defunct Planning Commission declared that the poverty index was Rs 32 a day. By the time the critics shredded the number, one realised that it was more a planning expert’s idea of poverty rather than a lived narrative of what such a number means as life or living conditions.

I think this problem of number haunts us and the Modi regime today. When it talks of investments and trade, it talks number. The question before news is can it take these narratives and the reader to a new understanding of the logic and processes of reality? Then disasters will not sound like spectacles far away and agricultural suicides will produce the right response from society. Number needs a new humanity.