Indian Media are Models of Inconsistency, aren’t they?

 

Indian Media are Models of Inconsistency, aren’t they?

Regarding what, who, or even how I say that, you may ask. This post is about to answer the title question. The question may, for all I know, go unanswered. I am lowering the readers’ expectations.

Take an article in the English language newspapers or magazines published in India, such as Times of India, The New Indian Express, The Hindustan Times, The Hindu, Frontline, The Week, you would find numbers mentioned in–beyond purely Hindu numerical–hundreds of thousands, crores, billions (all regarding population counts), lakh crores, billions again (mentioning currency), cusecs (cubic feet per second), cumecs (cubic meters per second), (water discharge from a reservoir), acre-feet, cubic kilometre, (water availability), acre, square kilometre (area of cultivable/cultivated land).

It has been about 50 years since the world (the US being the exception that proves the rule) discarded the British Standards of measurements. Out went inches, feet, mile, cubic inches, acres; fortunately the unit of time, second remained thanks to the SI (International System of Units, or as the French would say, Syst me international d’unit s) also adopting the same, or forcing the others to adopt SI units. The speed of light in vacuum has not been mentioned in physics as 186,282 miles/s for the past 50 years or so; it has always been and continues to be 299,792,458 m/s.

As a has-been technocrat who cut his teeth in the early to mid- to late 1970s and suffered through the transition from the Foot-Pound-Second system (there was also a unit Slug which I do not recall measured what, force or mass) to Centimetre-Gram-Second, to Meter-Kilogram-Second (there was a finer distinction, between kilogram mass and kilogram weight, related by the acceleration due to gravity; 1 kilogram weight = 9.81 kilogram mass) and later to SI units, I have paid the price of conversion(s), secular, I hasten to add. I do not wish to go through that anymore.

In my UG studies, it was confusion galore, between and among all the three systems. During my PG studies, God saved me: It was exclusively MKS. During my Ph.D course work, it was FPS. When I returned to India, it was SI. Again and again, I turned myself into a pretzel. Or, more appropriate, a scene from Charlie Chaplin’s movie Modern Times: gnashed between gear teeth, all the different sets of units of measurement. Each gear wheel is a unit of measurement and I was gnashed between them.

In the above pictures, on the top you see  Chaplin hedged  between the central and the right-most wheels and at the bottom, between the left-most and the central. My take is, industrialization did not merely bring machines into the workspace but made machines out of humans, a leftist idea that Chaplin was more than suspected of harbouring.

Fortunately, I used a scientific calculator in my post-retirement (?) job as a member of the faculty at a private university.  There was a ready-reckoner in most of the electronic calculators in use by the students and the faculty; the factors for conversion between different units from different systems were at hand. Though I stuck to SI units (all the books have adopted this set of units as their standard), the fact that the students can do such conversions at ease brought to my face a smile of satisfaction; India is not stuck in the 1970s!

I look forward to the day when no scientific calculator (including those used by engineers of the US) would provide a ready-reckoner for conversion from SI units. That would be the day light would travel at a speed of 299,792,458 m/s, no ambiguity anywhere!

Now, I come to the media outlets. Yes, acre-feet is a vivid unit when it comes to measuring water used for irrigation–water would stand to a height of one foot over a spread of one acre. It can be, more importantly, should be converted to hectare-meter (a hectare is 10⁴ square meter; 1 acre = 4,046.856 m²  è1 hectare = 2.471 acres; 1 hectare-meter = 2.471 x 3.281 = 8.107 acre-foot; and so on). These days, when I unashamedly (as I am hardly 1.57 meters) ask exceptionally tall Indian students how tall they are, they invariably tell me in meters. This is fantastic! I do not have to do conversion! They are 30 cm taller than me.

In peri-urban, semi-urban, and rural areas, masons working on small buildings (no taller than two storey buildings) still do their calculations for the number of bricks required only in inches. If engineers themselves are not shifting to SI units, are we justified in asking such masons to shift their measurement systems from one to another? Media can do its part. Be consistent. No more lakh crores, only billions; no more cusecs, only cumecs; no more acre-feet, only hectare-meter ...

I have heard this somewhere and it sounds trite. Yet, I’ll repeat: Be the change you want to see ...

Raghuram Ekambaram