The day numbers stopped being numbers

I have been working in journalism for six years. Led data research at The Business Standard. My days were filled with inflation charts, GDP growth, poverty lines – numbers that told stories but never screamed.

But on August 5, the numbers did scream.

That day, I was not tracking economic trends. I was logging dead bodies.

Dhaka was under siege. The "March on Dhaka" had drawn hundreds of thousands into the streets. The regime was collapsing. Sheikh Hasina had stepped down. But instead of surrender, the state responded with bullets.

Close to 400 people were killed that day, the UN later confirmed. I counted 132 with my own hands – one cell in Excel at a time.

The roads were blocked. No one from my team could make it to the newsroom. So I sat there – alone, yet surrounded by chaos – getting death updates from the TBS online team, who were fielding calls from reporters at hospitals, morgues, and blood-soaked streets. As the names came in, I started building the death log in an Excel sheet. That was my job now – to count the dead.

Most of the deaths I recorded came from just a few overwhelmed hospitals – Dhaka Medical College Hospital, Shaheed Suhrawardy Medical College Hospital, Uttara Crescent Hospital and Enam Medical College Hospital.

Nearly every confirmed death – I logged the number along with place, as precisely as possible. One after another.

I stopped blinking. I stopped reacting. I just typed.

By 8:00 PM, the death toll I recorded reached 21. I sent the first update to the Chief News Editor (CNE) for a graphic. It was just a bar chart – but behind every bar was a shattered family.

Then at 9:27 PM, I had logged 112 confirmed deaths. Not only from the TBS online desk – now also from one of our field reporters, Fosial bhai.

I handed over the fourth version of the chart to the CNE and said, quietly: "There will be more."

By 10:20 PM, the number was 132.

I am a data guy. But that day, I was not crunching numbers – I was counting the cost of autocracy.