60% of Mumbaikars feel that school buses should be made compulsory for school going kids. This according to them would help ease the city’s traffic woes. 82% of Mumbaikars feel that smoking should be banned in public places. Now I have nothing against kids going to school in dad’s car nor do I hate smokers. The only thing that bothers me when I read such statistics in newspapers is ‘How come they never asked me for my views on these issues when every other Mumbaikar’s opinion was counted?’

I often wonder, how do media and other market research agencies come up with these statistics? Interestingly, they come up with all sorts of claims - that 74% of Mumbaikars are not interested in politics; 80% of Indian adults admit that they have given or accepted bribe at least once in their life; and 65% of Indian internet users feel that it is OK to download and listen to pirated music. My question is how come I never got surveyed when these agencies were putting up these interesting numbers? How did they all miss me out? Or is it like my statistics professor had once remarked “In this world there are lies, damn lies, and these are statistics”. So are these numbers all made up? Nah…. I don’t think so. I would like to believe that these news guys are honest people. They don’t lie. I feel that it’s just that somehow they missed me out. They forgot to ask me my views, not once, but every single time a survey was conducted. Why did they not ask my opinion?

Recently I read a claim by a research group which said that 80% of married Indians feel that it’s OK to occasionally lie to their spouses. Obviously, this time too, my opinion was not counted. I even asked my wife if she was consulted when they conducted this survey and she said she wasn’t (leaving me wondering if this was precisely one of those ‘lying to spouse’ moments that the survey was referring to).

I have a humble request to all those surveyors – The next time you do a survey on the views of Mumbaikars or Indians, please ask my opinion too. I will try to be honest while answering your questions. I am an Indian and very much a Mumbaikar. Just because I don’t blog in Marathi (errrrr…!!), please don’t brand me as a non-Mumbaikar and leave me out. My opinion matters, please count it.