On Being Numbered

My brother, a bank employee, avails himself of home travel allowance, a privilege given by his bank, sincerely without fail as much as possible. He looks forward to such “homely trips” quite nostalgically. He has been away from his native place for near three decades, still not feeling at home in the capital city that he is compelled to live in.

On one of such visits, he went to the market to get his favourite “gongura” and came with a face lit up. I could attribute his beaming look to the probability of meeting one of his old-time friends because his joy was boundless on such occasions.

I asked him curiously whether he met someone and he said “twenty”. I was amazed, at a loss to understand what he meant, whether he met twenty of his friends though it seemed a remote proposition. Sensing my bewilderment, he said in a tone of mischief, I met “no. twenty”. Was it a horse in a race or any figure of uniform measurements of twenty in this world of weights and measurements to assess beauty? My mind was trying to figure out the mysterious twenty.

He burst into peals of laughter and said, “Don’t you remember the number twenty in my college days?” Yes, I do. Who can ever forget the no. twenty, the only girl student in his class, who was the cynosure of the whole class. Not a day passed for us, without the mention of the no.20. by my brother who would entertain us with day to day happenings in his college. None of them knew her original name for a long time and they preferred to call her by her number even after knowing her name. My brother was also called by his number 34.

Very funny...very inhuman...The world is full of only facts and figures. Man is losing his identity and being branded as an animal in a brutal way. The system of referring to the defense personnel by numbers is in practice and it is justified for technical problems. A spy can be 007 or an Inspector of Police can have his own specified number or a police constable his own. But how far is it logical to carry on with calling people by their numbers in daily affairs?

The practice of addressing the students by their numbers is not uncommon among the teaching community. The classes with a large number of students, limited number of teaching hours, plenty of syllabus to complete are focused as some of the reasons cited as an excuse for referring to students by their numbers. Yet, I feel each student must be addressed by his/her name. The sacred bond between the teacher and the pupil gets impersonalized, restricted and the relationship turns out to be that of a machine and product. Isn’t human touch lost when you call a person “55”?

Vehicles are recognized by the numbers on their number-plates. The human being, the–crown-of-creation, is pulled down to the inanimate mechanical level by tags of numbers attached to him. What an ocean of difference it makes to a person in being addressed as “Sreya” and not no. 11. When do we learn to treat our peers as peers? How do we feel if we are called in the same way? In these days of sky-scrapers, if there are two adults and two children in a family, they will soon be called J-I, F-2, F-4 (junior one, floor two, flat four), or S-2, F-I, F-2 (senior two, floor one, flat two). How absurd if it really comes true!

We are so busy that we have no time to pronounce the full name of a person and we abbreviate it. A lovely name like Mohan Chandra V. becomes MCV-equal to municipal corporation of Vijayawada. Sure, we condense his whole personality, simultaneously, with a stroke on his very identity. This peculiar phenomenon is often seen in colleges, universities where lecturers and professors are referred to as ADR, BBC and so on and no one ever knows what their sweet names are. This results in awkwardness and embarrassment quite frequently. This becomes a practice and even on formal occasions, in the midst of superiors, special invitees and dignitaries, people are abbreviated much to the consternation of the audience and the person concerned.

The swifter the development of the world, the more aloof and self-centered man becomes. Man cannot afford to lose his concern and finer feelings for others, either because of his hectic schedule or a sophisticated life-style. There must be interpersonal-relations with respect on both sides. Condescending attitude with self­righteousness does not build lasting interpersonal relations. Let’s not shatter it still further by numbering and reducing people to “zero”.