They created numbers and destroyed values

During the recently concluded Champions' league you would have heard that if South Africa defeat Australia, India will be the number 1. This is what the number game has come to. Some one being rated the number 1 because some one else defeats the best team in the world. More often you also notice that the ranking of the bowlers and batsmen by the different rating agencies has no relation to the performance of the teams that they play for, but the obsession to number every one and any one who plays provides a different motivation to the players and the once celebrated team game has now been reduced to a 22-member game. This does not stop with cricket. You have the other biggest entertainment medium - movies also rated not by their sheer merit, but more by the producers / directors / actors affiliations. Then you have the ratings for actors, actresses, comedians, songs, musicians, etc. This rating has pervaded all spheres of our life, rating of educational institutions, consumer goods, never-ending serials (I am still not able to understand what is the rating for a serial is; is it which one tests your patience and that of the actors of the serial more than the others), hospitals, matrimonial sites, etc. Our rating indulgence is second only to the opinion surveys presented by our 24X7 mediocy (media idiocy) on any topic under the sun. The non- news channels do the same through talk shows.
People play this number game to make or break a product. Similarly doctors use numbers to scare patients. They have a range of values for all body parameters and use that to their advantage. During a sequence of tests even under controlled experiments performed in laboratories, it is difficult to maintain an ideal combination. What would happen in an un-controlled structure like our physiology?
Numbers are also used in the corporate world to drive performance. SMART is the buzz-word in corporates. (to-be continued)