Thursday 25 June 2009

Move over Honey, I’m Travelling on that Line

On the road between Manali and Solang, there are lines and lines of stalls which rent out skiing equipment and woollens. The stall-owners got to choose their own stall-numbers.
The stall in the background is the rather mundane No. 2424. Had I owned that stall, I would have called it: The One After 909.

7 comments:

Tommy said...

I know it's a stretch to conclude anything from so small a sample size (n=2), but I wonder why vendors seem to like stall numbers that are multiples of 101.

John Galt said...

Ya - even I remember this particular shop and I got similar feelings - - the numbers which are completely haywire... actually this is still better.. just imagine the possibilities for the shops after 999 or 666- even they have such boring numbers.... absolutely no logic or sequence to the numbering - it is worse than North Kolkata - enough for a person residing at Salt Lake to contemplate suicide...

Indecision Personified said...

And if I owned a shop beside yours I would call it - "The one beside the one with a really long name."

ha ha.

Shrabasti Banerjee said...

:D

Sroyon said...

@Tommy: See we went to and fro between Manali and Solang quite a few times, so I was able to do a cursory study of the trends in shop-numbering. I saw shop numbers of the form 101n for n=[1-9] though 2424 was the only 4-digit multiple I noticed. Multiples of 100 (of course) and 111 were well-represented too. Larger prime numbers (>23) were remarkably rare. I saw a 2003, but that was probably so named because it was established in that year.

@JG: Why? Randomness is sometimes interesting. We wouldn't be having this discussion if the shop numbers were as boring as Salt Lake addresses.

John Galt said...

I agree, Tintin... yes, sometimes randomness does bring forth an awesome excitement to life.. I remember we spent so much time reading about the perfect randomness of the utterance of a set of numbers during the Maths Olympiad days ... cause it seemed every set was connected by one weird way or the other.... Well, one close look at these shacks and we would have realized that perfect randomness is not a myth :)

Doubletake, Doublethink. said...

Wouldn't your OCD-ridden mind be happier with a number like 2424? More symmetry. Unless 2442 is more to your liking.