KL112 Mega Rally : The Numbers Game!

Counting is serious business. That was why you were sent to school to learn how to count.

Where you were taught that one plus one equalled to two. And two plus two equalled to four.

That was traditional arithmetic.

Nowadays, I am not too certain.

Smart teachers nowadays may tell you that one plus one equals to nothing and two plus two equals to something, although what that something is nobody knows for sure.

That is very neat - and smart! You never can go wrong with your counting.

Nobody can fail you and you can pass with flying colours.

Does that explain why we have so many A students nowadays?

So the Himpunan Kebangkitan Rakyat (The People's Resurgence Gathering or Rally) had come and gone.

From all the pictures available, it does seem that at least a 100,000 plus strong crowd had turned out for the rally at Stadium Merdeka.

In the stadium itself, with full capacity sitting of some 30,000 plus and possibly another 40,000 plus standing in the field packed sardine like, that would mean that inside the stadium itself, there must have been at least 70,000 stadium attendees.

What about the numbers outside? Did anybody do a proper count?

That must have explained why the police themselves initially tweeted that there were 80,000 people inside the stadium?

But perhaps quickly remembering what they might have been taught in school, they began to doubt  their owns eyes? and decided to reduce the figure to half! 

A precedent had already been set by the honourable minister of dot.com counting who had claimed that only about 20,000 to 25,000 people had actually turned out for the Bersih 3.0 rally last year when it was obvious that about ten times the number had done so.

The wise young man of Malaysia once chastised Najib's administration as consisting of only half-past six people.

Perhaps for once, I ain't gonna contradict him. You have to give some credit to that young man, he knows something that we might not, after all.

But I may be wrong. Who knows? If one plus one equals to nothing and two plus two equals to something and that something can be anything, who is to say what is what?

I stand corrected. Modern arithmetic is not my province.