I was thinking about quantitatively measuring both the breadth and depth of impact of great lives on ordinary people ala sachin kalam spb. The easiest and most relatable metric I can think of is MMJ - millions of minutes of joy(1/n).

The beauty of a great life is the franchise effect - the ability to create joy in millions of lives for many minutes even after long after they are not active or gone. It's a S curve that starts plateauing and in some cases the plateau can be practically endless...(2/n)

Like the mythical akshaya Patra. An entrepreneur lights up millions of customers and a few thousand employees and a few hundred vendors. Intuitively the greatest joy for the greatest number of people in a country like India can only come from sports or music or entertainment(3/n)

Simply because these bring joy for a long long time. Sportsmen bring a lot of people for a decade or two and fade away after that with exceptions like SRT. However music has the unique advantage of "contextless" - you can listen to a song independent of the context broadly (4/n)

And timeless - music stays on a lot lot longer than movies or sport in people's minds. For eg. I was greatly enthralled by Viv Richards but couldn't explain his phenomenon to this generation. Music generally is a lot more enduring than everything else I can think of. (5/n)

And popular film music is probably the largest joy for largest number of people from TV time to driving time to Spotify time it manages to snatch anywhere from 30 to 300 min of joy and provides an escape from an otherwise mundane life no matter who you are (6/n).

With 40000 songs across 52 years ranging from devotional to disco SPB and a near unrivalled ability to snatch 10 mins of time a day from across a minimum of 400 mn. People (all of South) across 6 decades ( may be one more) the MMJ for SPB must be simply the highest by far. (7/n)

Simply put there won't be another like him ever. And no one brought more joy ro more people for more days. #RIPSPBalaSubramanyamSir