Figuring it out

The sportsman-turned-MP Kirti Azad feels that cricket is being cheapened by the dancing girls who gyrate on a mini stage in the stadium each time a boundary is hit or a wicket falls in the IPL T20 tournament. The prime-time telecast of dancing girls could, he warns, have an adverse impact on young impressionable minds.
And so it was that when i caught up with a neighbour on a morning walk the other day, i expected her to echo Azad's concern.She was, i knew, worried about her nine-year-old daughter's lack of interest in serious subjects like mathematics which, the neighbour felt, held the key to the future. On a previous walk some eight weeks ago, she had even quipped that she was concerned that her daughter would grow up into the kind of girl who had been immortalised in a 1959 hit song: "I've got a girlfriend and she's kind of slow/ Could write a book on all she doesn't know/ Examinations she can never pass/ But when it comes to kissing she's the head of the class/ She's a backward child, pretty backward child/ Backward as can be..."
However, when i met the neighbour on the latest walk, she was gung-ho about the IPL and how it had activated her daughter's interest in mathematics. As she elaborated, "I was initially reluctant to let my daughter watch the daily IPL telecast because i thought she would also start shaking a leg like the dancing girls. However, she was a great fan of the young Royal Challengers Bangalore (RCB) skipper Virat Kohli and would sit down with a scribbling-pad to keep track of his score. Whenever the RCB played, she would calculate the required scoring-rate at the end of each over, and she got so good at it that she could mentally work it out. At one stage when it looked as if the RCB could scrape through to the semi-finals on the basis of the net run-rate, she even calculated the NRR."
"Of course," the neighbour continued, "she was disappointed when the RCB failed to qualify. But there has been a dramatic improvement in her performance over the last few weeks in the mathematics tests in school. If she maintains this progress over the next seven years, she could even crack the IIT-JEE and then the IIM-CAT — something neither her father nor i managed to do!"
Returning home from the walk, i realised that there was more to IPL than what i had thought. Apart from toning up the physique by getting kids to shake a leg, IPL could, going by the neighbour's daughter's experience, also limber up the mind in areas like applied mathematics. And so what if the neighbour's daughter never became a mathematical genius like Srinivasa Ramanujan who, while being treated for tuberculosis in 1918 in London, was once visited by his British mentor Hardy who told him that he had come to the nursing home in a cab whose licence plate carried the "rather dull number" 1729.
To which the Indian retorted, "No Hardy, it is a very interesting number. It is the smallest number expressible as the sum of two pairs of cubes in two different ways — a number equal to both 12-cubed plus 1-cubed, and to 10-cubed plus 9-cubed.'' An IPL-fostered interest in applied mathematics could take one places, career-wise, whereas a Ramanujan can best be remembered by posterity as the man who knew infinity. And so what if Hardy had a contempt for applied mathematics which he once described as "the parts which have least aesthetic value".
Just like a 17th-century apple could be remembered for sparking off the thought process which culminated in the discovery of gravity by falling on Isaac Newton's head, IPL could, i told myself, be credited with activating my neighbour's daughter's interest in mathematics and pre-empting the dumbing down of another backward child of the kind immortalised by Bill Forbes 53 years ago.