This Friday, Sachin Tendulkar completed 100 international cricket centuries and did something that would have been considered impossible by many—prevent millions of Indians from realizing that the new budget is going to make prices rise even more. He also gave everyone an excuse to come up with all kinds of puns involving his name and the word Ton. I wonder if someone’s said Ton Ton Gopaal yet.
Now, I don’t follow cricket all that much—I mean, I do watch a couple of matches a year to justify my Indian citizenship, and I keep track of big events such as this one, but that’s pretty much all. But I’ve always been confused by the word Ton. To me, it always meant 1000 kg, so I wondered why 100 runs were called a ton, especially when there was a term _quintal_ used for 100 kgs. The Wikipedia page for the word _ton_ is pretty long and interesting. You have the metric tonne, the short tonne, and there are a dozen other kinds of tons based on what you are talking about. It turns out that this unit has a pretty long history, and means so many different things in different fields that I get the impression that for every quantity, there exists some part of the world where the word _ton_ is used to denote it. And it’s also used colloquially to refer to 100 of a given unit, which explains how a century in cricket is called a ton.
You would think it doesn’t make much of a difference, as people would be able to figure out from context. 1½ years ago, in the mid-semester examination for the Machine Design course, we were asked to design a coupling that could take an axial loading of 1 ton. I was pretty sure that 1 tonne meant 1000 kg, but this was the conversation that ensued between three people of our department—
OL: 1 tonne kitna hota hai? [How much is 1 tonne?]
RK: 100 kgs
VJ: 1000000 kgs hota hai [It’s 1000000 kgs]
RK: Kya fart hai… toh Tendulkar 100 marta hai toh kyu bolte hai ton mara…? [What the fuck? In that case, when Sachin hits a 100, why do you say that he hit a ton?]
Sadly enough, the ones who interpreted 1 ton as anything other than 1000 kg lost a lot of marks on that question, Sachin’s tons notwithstanding. They learnt it the hard way, but I hope other don’t have to. Students, don’t get so swayed away by the tons of puns that are doing the rounds, and remember that a tonne is almost never equal to 100 kgs.