Trust a nerd to rice to the occasion: Reducing Bezos’s wealth to 26 kg has made the number easier to swallow

At the height of the Harshad Mehta controversy in 1992, some people calculated that he could not have possibly stuffed Rs 1 crore into the infamous suitcase deemed to be the receptacle of a bribe. Given that many if not most Indians were unable to visualise that much money anyway, the suitcase conundrum became rather arcane. Today, Amazon promoter Jeff Bezos’ net worth has so many more zeros than a mere crore that even Indians who are by now familiar with numbers such as the “notional loss of Rs 1.76 lakh crore in 2G licences”, are left bewildered.

How many zeroes are in $116 billion (give or take a few) anyway, or, for that matter, in its equivalent in rupees? In that context, numerically challenged people worldwide should thank TikTok star Humphrey Yang from Silicon Valley for reducing each $100,000 to an easily digestible grain of rice. After all, William Blake wrote about holding infinity “in the palm of your hand” and Bezos’ dollars could well be characterised as just that.

In Yang’s $100,000-rice analogy, $1 million is just 10 grains — not even a coffeespoon-full — and $1 billion is 10,000 grains, or just about the amount consumed by an average Indian family for lunch. However, Bezos’s total wealth — 116 times that lunchtime amount, or about 26 kg — may be even too much for avowed rice-eaters to swallow easily.