Games people play

STEVE Waugh said recently after arriving here that mind games were a ploy to beat India. Let me assure you that such is not my intention and Mind Games should not be blamed if we lose this series. Mind games are also played inside stadiums.

American basketball team, with all its NBA stars, is always the title favourite in Olympics. However, as the NBA players rarely play in Asia, most of the Asian teams do not know their strengths or weaknesses. Most of the information about the NBA players that reaches coaches of Asian teams, is foul and inadequate.

The Chinese basketball coach is told that Shaquille O’Neal of the USA is 14 inches taller than Khalid-El-Amin. The difference between Shaquille O’Neal and Chris Dudley is two inches less than between Richard and Khalid-El-Amin. Shaquille O’Neal at 6’6" is the tallest.

China is to play its first match in the Olympics against the USA and the Chinese coach is confused. He wants to know how tall are Chris Dudley and Khalid-El-Amin, before he forms his strategy. A Shaolin monk, a great fan of the team, approaches him and says, "Brother, if Shaquille O’Neal is 6’6" tall, Khalid-El-Amin must be 5’4" tall, and Chris Dudley must be 6’ tall because he is 6" shorter than Shaquille O’Neal and 8" taller than Khalid-El-Amin."

In test runs at the Monte Carlo Grand Prix, meanwhile, a formula-1 car travels at 30 mph over a distance, and then returns over the same distance at 20 mph. Michael Schumacher, driver of the Ferrari, wants to know what has been his average speed during the drive, but is too embarrassed to admit that he does not know any mathematics.

Most of the persons on the Ferrari team are quick to answer that his average speed has been 25 mph, but this is not correct and the Ferrari director, Jean Todt, knows it. He calculates mentally, "The distance travelled was 60 miles each way. Then, the trip out was = 60/30 = 2 hours, and the trip back was = 60/20 = 3 hours. Therefore,

the average speed during the 120 mile trip was = 120/5 = 24 mph." "Michael, it is 24, not 25," he yells out, just in time, to Schumacher before he takes the pole position.

Olympics Stadium in Sydney, before the opening ceremony of the millennium games: A woman volunteer has 100 yards of cloth on a single roll and she wants to divide it into 100 lengths of one

yard each, for a dance sequence. Time is the enemy. It takes her 3 seconds to cut each length. She works non-stop, while the other volunteers wonder how long it will take her to cut all 100 pieces. Most of the other girls say that she will take 300 seconds, which seems to be a straight answer, but the others disagree. They even place a small bet on this.

The volunteer takes 297 seconds and not 300 seconds to finish the work. The girls who have lost the bet are now anxious to know where have they made a mistake in calculation. The other girls tell them that the volunteer is able to achieve the target in 297 seconds because 100 pieces are made in 99 cuts. The last cut results in two pieces instead of one. The answers to most problems of mathematics are often not the obvious ones.

In Europe, meanwhile, former champions of Tour-de-France, Greg LeMond and Miguel Indurain, decide to meet. They plan to bicycle towards each other and meet halfway. Each of them is riding at 6 mph and they live 36 miles apart. Miguel has a pet carrier pigeon, his lucky mascot, that always travels with him. It starts flying the moment these men start off from their homes. This pigeon flies back and forth at 18 mph between the two until Miguel and Greg meet.

"Wow! Nice pigeon," says Greg, "How far do you think it has travelled?" "I have no idea," says Miguel. "It has taken three hours for you two to meet, so I have been flying for 3 hours at 18 mph, thus covering 54 miles," says the pigeon. "I didn’t know it could talk," says Greg to Miguel. "Well, neither did I. The person who sold me this pigeon had only said that he had bought it from a German jew named Einstein or something," says Miguel.

— Aditya Rishi