I have been reading some really crazy numbers in the media lately –

• $110 billion – Apple’s 2012 Q2 earnings
• Rs6000 crore – Indian stock market scam
• $2.2 billion – Vodafone’s tax battle in India
• $1 billion – Facebook’s buyout of Instagram

These numbers don’t even mean anything to me. I read them, but it does not tell me the tangible value they hold unless I put a billion into perspective:

• 1 Starbucks coffee daily for 27,39,726 years.
• 50 Ferrari 250 GTOs – the most expensive Ferrari model there is.
• The New iPad for 20lakh people.

When I was a kid a million was a big number. These days, that number has grown by a 100 times to a billion. After a point in time, will these numbers even matter? Will we start looking at how many people was this money taken from and how did it come to be with just one entity?