50,000 reasons to pick a bone; no ifs and 10,000 butts

Does Gyandev Ahuja lie awake at night wondering if he missed a cigarette butt here or a condom there? Perhaps he failed to count a couple of bones, thus bringing down the average somewhat. For, of all the statistics to emerge from the Jawaharlal Nehru University in recent days, the most fascinating have been spouted by Ahuja, a BJP member of Parliament, who, presumably on his hands and knees, traversed the 1,020 acres that make up the university to reveal to the world how stunningly ordinary the students are: they are adults who eat, drink and make merry.

I see him in my mind’s eye, wearing a deerstalker, perhaps smoking a pipe, peering through a magnifying glass and occasionally shouting, “The game’s afoot.” Was that a beedi or a wrapper, a bottle of liquor or 12,000 bones arranged to look like one? At the end of all this hard work (did he conduct the exercise over 30 days and then work out the average?), here’s what he found:

Every day, JNU students drank 2,000 bottles of liquor, threw away 10,000 cigarette butts, 4,000 beedis, used 3,000 condoms, 3,000 beer cans, 2,000 packets of chips, 50,000 bone pieces big and small. No figures are available for the number of dead mosquitos, torn bus tickets and unused nose-hair tweezers. Perhaps these will be revealed after the next round of sleuthing.

Where was everything found? Did Ahuja go through garbage bags, gaps in the barks of trees, terraces, insides of discarded shoes?

Two, no three, questions ask themselves. How come all these are in round figures, do the students stop as soon as the 10,000th cigarette is smoked? Do the 3,000 students (of the roughly 8,000) have sex with other students, and how do the 2,000 who don’t on any given day amuse themselves? And finally, where was all this when I was in college? Ahuja’s research will probably send the college fees soaring. He has made it very attractive to go for higher studies. He should be commissioned to do similar research in other institutions (after he is given a national award, of course). How many condoms in IIT Kharagpur, for instance? Or St Joseph’s College, Bangalore?

Comparative analysis should keep statisticians busy for a generation at least. In one stroke, Ahuja would have solved problems of antidisestablishmentarianism and unemployment.

What do Ahuja’s figures tell us? That 2,000 students are each entitled to a bottle of liquor, a packet of chips and 25 pieces of bone big and small, two beedis, five cigarettes and one and a half condoms daily? You can work out your own permutations and combinations.

It might be too late to appoint Ahuja the Poet Laureate (there is poetry in all those zeroes, after all) or Astronomer Royal, but such industry and arithmetical precision calls for a special post. National Butt Counter might offend the cigarette smokers, the Bone Collector or the India Rubber Man sound too much like Hollywood movies. This is where you come in, dear reader.

Suresh Menon is Contributing Editor, The Hindu