Drowning in India ink.

Three million people is a lot of people. In fact, three million is a lot of quite a few things. I know this because I looked it up on some new website called {checks notes} "Google."

Three million people is roughly the population of Baltimore, Denver or San Diego when you're counting every man, woman, and child. Even the ones still crawling on the floor and wetting their diapers.

Now imagine you're some government civil servant who needs to hand every single one of those three million residents a clipboard, a government badge, a pen, and some words of encouragement, and then send them door to door to count everyone else in a census.

A census of roughly 1.5 billion people, being sure to count them all.

Not most people.

Everyone.

That's what's taking place in India. Fortunately, India has three million people to spare, mostly existing government employees, with teachers being prominent among them, who will be reassigned as census workers.

The Indian government calls them field functionaries. I have to assume the field functionaries will develop their own, less official and more colorful vocabulary somewhere around house number four hundred or so.

The Indian census was supposed to happen in 2021. Then COVID showed up, and India did what every other government on Earth did when faced with the deadly, highly contagious, respiratory virus: it postponed the plan and learned how to make sourdough bread from scratch, instead.

Five years later, here we are, and the forest of clipboards are back out.

Governments, and people in general, like numbers because numbers promise that things are knowable, that reality, however enormous, can be cornered, counted, and... taxed. But do you really understand how big of a number 1.5 billion actually is?

It's a number that doesn't mean anything to an actual human brain, which was built to track roughly a hundred and fifty interpersonal relationships and a couple dozen berries that look like they might not be poisonous. Our brains aren't designed to fully grasp the population of a subcontinent. Or a mogul's bank account.

Try this: shake someone's hand. For just one second. Firm grip, brief eye contact, then move on to the next person. There are more of them waiting in your nice little rope line.

Imagine there's a million people standing in line for you. One second each, no bathroom breaks. That's eleven and a half days of nonstop handshaking. Doable, in the way a very bad vacation is "doable."

Now imagine the line has grown to one billion people. That's not a bad vacation anymore. That's just shy of thirty-two years. You would start as a fresh-faced twenty-something and finish as someone eligible for a retirement party, having done nothing with your life but shake hands, one second at a time, for a number that still isn't India's population, much less a rounding error in Elon Musk's checkbook.

India's population would bring the total to roughly forty-seven and a half years of continuous handshaking. You would begin the project in your twenties and finish it, if you finished it at all, somewhere around your first grandchild's college graduation.

Oh. Wait. You didn't have the free time to produce any children or grandchildren. Bummer. And that bathroom break is probably looking pretty good right about now.

A hundred people, you can picture. Ten thousand starts feeling stadium-shaped. A million is about where the mind quietly excuses itself to the w/c and never comes back.

A billion is a perfectly serviceable math fact and a completely useless mental image. It's only when you convert it into decades of your own handshake-numbed life that it becomes viscerally, uncomfortably real.

This, incidentally, is why the word "billionaire" slides right past us. We hear it, we nod, we move on, because the brain that can't picture a billion handshakes also can't picture a billion dollars. We just round it internally to "really fucking rich," the same way we round 1.5 billion people to "a metric shit-ton." The number is doing something to our brains that the number itself refuses to let us see.

So India is doing something a little heroic, if you think about it. And also doing something utterly absurd, of course, otherwise I wouldn't be writing about it.

Knock on the door.
Ask how many people live here.
Write it down.
Move to the next house.

There are hundreds of millions of households. Keep going.

Camus wrote about Sisyphus who was condemned to push a boulder up a hill for eternity, fully aware the boulder was contractually obligated to roll back down every single time. Camus decided the only sane response was to imagine Sisyphus happy about it, to find the meaning in the pushing.

The Indian census worker gets the bureaucratic drudgery and flickering fluorescent lights version of the same assignment, minus the boulder, but plus a lanyard: find everybody, knowing full well that somewhere behind you a baby is being born, and somewhere in front of you someone's already moved to Mumbai. The list you're building is out of date before you finish writing it.

Push the rock. Knock on the door.

And of course the three million census workers are themselves Indian citizens, which means the people counting the population are also, technically, part of the population being counted. Somewhere, presumably, is a spreadsheet cell containing a census worker's own household, filled out by a colleague, who is also being counted by someone else, who is also...

Look, there's a perfectly sensible bureaucratic procedure for how this all resolves without the universe folding in on itself, I just don't need to know it. It's enough to be a delightful picture in my mind: three million people fanning out to count 1.5 billion people, a small but non-zero fraction of whom are the counters, counting each other, presumably while also privately wondering who's counting them. At some point the only reasonable response, cosmic paradox be damned, is to just knock on the next door.

Hello. How many people live here?

And this is where the incomprehensible thankfully becomes human-sized again.

A billion and a half is a number for charts, speeches, and men in suits gesturing gravely at screens during Congressional budget hearings. It is not a number anyone has ever actually met.

But the census worker doesn't encounter 1.5 billion people, the census worker encounters you. Then your spouse, who is annoyed you didn't mention your lazy cousin who's sleeping on the sofa. Then your kids, one of whom insists on being counted as "basically an adult." Then the next house. Then the next. One door, one slightly awkward conversation about the extended family situation, one line on a form until the incomprehensible collapses, house by house, into something an actual person can see in front of them (and mildly complain about having to do instead of the job they were, you know, hired for).

And maybe that's what numbers are for. We invent them because reality is too big to hold. And then, when the numbers themselves get too big, we invent something even stranger to manage them: abstractions, handshaking analogies, armies of ordinary people, walking around with clipboards, converting the sublime back into the mundane, one door-knock at a time.

But, man, do fights break out when you try to tax them!

(By the way, it would take 31,688 years of continuous hand-shaking to reach the number one trillion— a trillion of course being the approximate personal net worth of whatshisname. I need to check that "Google" again.)

Three million people meeting one and a half billion people. Forty-seven and a half years of handshakes, if you were foolish enough to try it that way. Somewhere in the overlap, a teacher who normally grades algebra homework is standing on a stranger's doorstep in the Rajasthan heat, asking a very old, very confused man to please state, for the permanent record, how many people currently reside in his home.

There's probably a perfectly reasonable explanation for it all.