Your normal may not be someone else's normal

Photo from Friday magazine, March 30, 2012 (Published in the UAE)

Cricket, for about a third of the world's population it is a fascinating and thrilling sport, but for places that were never part of the Queen Victoria's British empire it is a boring mystery. In India it is by far the number one sport.

But it is not just cricket that is a mystery to a big chunk of the non-Indian population, the Indian numbering system also is a bit of mystery to people outside the sub-continent.

When Tata was working on its tiny car the Nano, the goal was for a "1 Lakh vehicle". And, "What is a Lakh"? A Lakh is the term to denote 100,000. In the case of the Nano, 100,000 rupees, or about $2,500 USD. The next step up Indian number system is the "Crore". (A "crore" is 100 lakhs.)As such, it is a significant milestone in counting.

In the west the magnitudes; thousand, million, billion, trillion etc., all go up by three places. So a figure, such as 30 million, would be written 30,000,000.

But if the sum is to be paid out in rupees, as is the case in the photo above (and enlarged below), the commas are placed differently.

Detail of photo from Friday magazine, March 30, 2012

Here the commas are used to indicate the number of crores (3), and the number of lakhs (0). So unlike western numbering where there are three digits between each comma, here there may be either two or three.

The critical lesson is that what is normal for me in the west may seem very odd to someone in India, and I can't assume that my way of doing anything is their way.