As per UN estimates, there are a total of 6671226000 people in the world as of July 2007. India has a population of 116901600 – that’s 17.52% of the world’s population.

According to the 2006 NRS figures, a total of 230000000 individuals across India have access to cable and satellite television. That’s about 19.7% of the population that would have access to ESPN and / or Star Cricket (assuming we can ignore the limited implementation of conditional access).

Now the 2001 census, puts the proportion of the urban population at 27.78%. If we assume that the rural-urban population mix has remained the same over the last 6 years, and the World Bank seems to indicate it was the same in 2002, we could probably take the urban Indian population with access to cable & satellite television as 63894000

TV ratings for yesterday’s match were 47.2%, so extrapolate that to represent urban Indian population reached by either of the channels and you have 30157968 individuals who would have seen the match.

Let’s make a simple assumption that all of them were overjoyed by the result.

So, that’s at least 0.5% of the world’s population that is extremely happy today.

Okay so the world per se, may not necessarily have become a happier place overnight but who cares... everyone's all perked up, people generally went crazy last night, the newspapers are all over the place, and even the employers are celebrating with ice cream at Corner House. We finally won a World Cup, so yay!

Hmm... there’s still the rural audience, which we can’t get TV ratings for and various sections of the Indian diaspora (no figures again) and all those satellite TV-less people who would have crowded in front of TVs at restaurants and offices and neighbour’s houses, and well... a lot of people must be happy:)