120m attend Hindu festival: Numbers defy comprehension
Some of the metrics we use to measure our world — distance, speed, population, wealth — stretch our capacity to understand.
The idea of 100,000 people at one of Daniel O’Connell’s monster meetings in the 1840s is not difficult to digest.
Neither is the record 50,141 at last September’s Ladies’ All-Ireland football final between Dublin and Cork.
However, the population of China — 1.386bn — must lead to some head-scratching.
So, too, must some of the distances covered in recent missions to Mars, a mere 54.6m km away.
It takes up to 300 days to get there, even travelling at 58,000km/h. These figures may beyond anything we can easily imagine.
Wealth is another metric that fascinates; its scale may impress or abhor, maybe both at once.
The world’s richest man, Jeff Bezos, had last year as much money as 2.7m Americans.
A report put his net worth at €150bn, so even if his looming divorce costs him half that, he will still afford a five-star lifestyle.
Despite those spectacular totals, the massive crowds — an incredible 120m people — expected at the Kumbh Mela, a mammoth festival at the confluence of two sacred Indian rivers, the Ganges and Yamuna, that began yesterday, seem of an entirely different order (it is recognised as the biggest gathering of people in history).
It is difficult to even begin trying to get to grips with the idea of 120m people, almost 25 times the population of this country, at one place — even if, as Bob Dylan assures us, every grain of sand is numbered.
