Pop Indices

Popular culture remembers the line.Economics remembers the price.

One object from one scene, priced every year since the film. Real series, the full equation, and the sources on the page.

Open the indicesSee the maths
01The collection

9 indices, 9 kinds of data

Gold, land, a burger, a vegetable, a desktop PC, a baseball win, a share of Apple. One method has to hold across all of it, or it holds across none of it.

02Method

What is being measured

Not what a film lifestyle would cost. One object, one number, traced year by year.

  1. 01

    Scene

    A moment with something countable in it.

    “50 tola.”

  2. 02

    Unit

    The object, stated exactly.

    50 tolas of 24-karat gold

  3. 03

    Dataset

    A published series that covers it.

    IBJA / RBI gold price per 10 g

  4. 04

    Equation

    Every step, its source, its rounding rule.

    58.319 × price per 10 g

  5. 05

    Index

    The value, what inflation took, what it costs to buy.

    ₹59,19,379 · +2,297%

What this is not

  • An inflation calculator
  • A meme archive
  • Film trivia
  • Investment advice
  • Numbers without sources
03The instruments

Two ideas do all the work

Neither was invented for this. A consumer price index and a purchasing-power comparison are the standard tools for asking what a number meant at the time — which is the only question a line of dialogue ever poses.

Consumer price index

What the money was worth

A CPI tracks what a fixed basket of goods costs over time. Divide any old price by the change in that basket and you get the figure in today’s money — the number a person would actually feel.

It is what separates a price that rose from a price that got more expensive. Fifty tolas of gold went up 2,297% in rupees and 432% after inflation. A computer got 124% dearer on the shelf and 15% cheaper in real terms. Both are true, and only one of them is the story.

real = nominal ÷ (current CPI ÷ base-year CPI)

Purchasing power parity

What the money could buy

Hold a product physically identical and let the country change around it. The price gap that remains is not really about the product. It is about wages, taxes, rent and the exchange rate, priced into one object anyone can picture.

Economists have run this on burgers for decades, half seriously. Vincent Vega does the same thing in a car in 1994 and gets a laugh. The method is identical. Only the framing changed.

local price ÷ median local wage = hours of work

Popular culture is full of dated price quotations.Nobody wrote them down as data.

A screenwriter picks a number because it sounds right in the room. That makes it a rough record of what an audience thought something cost, in a year you can date exactly. Run it through the same instruments a statistical agency uses and the joke turns into a measurement — of gold, of land, of a vegetable, of a desktop computer, of a share nobody sold.

Everything here shows its working. Each figure traces to an observation, each observation to a dataset with a publisher and a date somebody last checked it. An estimate is labelled an estimate.

Figures are a committed snapshot, last verified 31 December 2025, across 21 datasets — not a live feed.

Cinema exaggerates.Markets keep receipts.

Research, data modelling and interface in one artefact — popular culture put through the instruments modern economics already uses. This is the work Duku does, on a subject nobody asked us to take seriously.

Created by Duku Design Labs

Work with DukuMethodology