The Spreadsheet That Made Me Wonder

The first time I encountered Lakh notation, I genuinely considered three alternative explanations before the correct one occurred to me.

The spreadsheet had arrived from a colleague based in Colombo, Sri Lanka. Smart person, solid professional, well-regarded in the organization. And yet here was a document where larger numbers suddenly had two digits between commas instead of three. My eyes kept sliding off the figures. Nothing added up — literally.

My first thought: Excel glitch. I had seen conversion issues between Windows and Mac before, the kind of thing that scrambles formatting without warning. I checked my settings. Nothing.

Second thought: something went wrong in the email transfer. I downloaded the attachment again. Same result.

Third thought—and I am not proud of this one, but honesty is the point—maybe the colleague was simply not very careful with numbers. I had two master's degrees from European universities and a technical background. I had never seen anything like this in my professional life.

It took an embarrassingly long time before the correct explanation surfaced: this was not an error. This was a system. A completely coherent, internally consistent numerical notation used daily by hundreds of millions of people across South Asia and completely unknown to me despite what I had considered a reasonably international education and career.

Lakh. One hundred thousand. Written as 1,00,000. Crore. Ten million. Written as 1,00,00,000.

The grouping works differently from the international system — thousands first, then groups of two rather than three. It reflects the spoken language, where these are the natural numerical landmarks. It is not arbitrary. It is not wrong. It is just not the system that European and American businesses adopted as the global standard.

I thought about that colleague in Colombo for a long time afterward. We had a complicated relationship—there were cultural undercurrents I was only beginning to understand, and that spreadsheet had arrived at a moment of some tension between us. My initial reaction—confusion shading into mild condescension—was not my finest hour. He had sent me a perfectly normal document in his perfectly normal notation, and I had privately questioned his competence.

He had no idea any of this was happening. How could he? The spreadsheet was not strange. I was the one who did not know the system.

That asymmetry is the whole problem. You cannot pay attention to something that is perfectly normal to you. Asking an Indian colleague to “watch out for Lakh notation in external communications” is like asking someone to notice the color of the air. It requires a kind of double consciousness—seeing your default through someone else's eyes—that is genuinely difficult to maintain under normal working conditions.

Which is why it keeps happening. Not from carelessness. From the simple fact that cultural defaults are invisible to the people who hold them. Sheets, corrected today, somehow might've returned to Lakh notation by the morning. And creeping into your presentation for that conference in Lausanne next week.

When I later started working regularly with Indian firms, I encountered Lakh notation in international communications constantly. Proposals to European investors. Financial models sent to London banks. Project budgets shared with Swiss foundations. Always perfectly clear to the sender. Always requiring a moment of confused recalibration on the receiving end. Which might not happen anyway, as your message is competing with attention from more clearly attuned senders—it's rather tempting to give those preference.

Even if it happens—and you will be surprised to know how often it does not—that moment of recalibration is not neutral. It interrupts the reader's engagement with your content at exactly the point where you need their full attention. And it raises a question—however briefly and unfairly—about whether the sender understands the context they are communicating in.

First impressions in European business are formed rapidly and revised very slowly. A spreadsheet is not just a spreadsheet. It is a signal about how carefully you have prepared, how well you understand your audience, and how seriously you take the relationship.

Thirty seconds of reformatting before you hit send. That is the entire ask.

My colleague in Colombo eventually found other reasons not to like me—I was, after all, only just beginning the long education in how to bridge cultures without burning them in the process. But at least I learned to read his numbers correctly.

The Colombo spreadsheet was one moment of confusion. But why do two perfectly coherent numerical systems exist in the first place — and how did a civilisation that gave the world its numbers end up speaking a different numerical language from the world it taught? That story goes back further than you might expect: The Numbers That Got Lost in Translation.