the length of a thesis?

John Nash, the brilliant mathematician and joint Nobel Prize winner of Economics in 1994, and proponent of the Game Theory, actually wrote a 28-page manuscript for his Doctoral Thesis. i am yet to understand why was i made to write an 80 pg and 300 pg thing for my Masters and Bachelors theses respectively. So much for the emphasis given to heavy paper-work in the Indian Education System. I remember wrapping up the same 80-pg document as a 22 page thing at the TUM; and the painstaking effort involved in bloating it up by 58 more for a "standard" report at IIT.