Sleeping through the static

Vidhu Vinod Chopra seems to have lost it. After all this Eklayva nonsense, he's just shooting his mouth off. And Sajid Khan hasn't taken kindly to some of his rants. Read Khan's 'open letter' to Chopra.

And going back, here's an interesting interviewChopra did with Tehelka back in June.

"Last rites of a pianful career," surmised a friend at the office.

I was flying back to India after watching the two semi-finals of the 1999 cricket World Cup and the line for check-in at Heathrow was, as expected, full with plenty of Indians.

This particular line included a sizeable Punjabi contingent, ranging from crying infants to bow-legged grandparents. This distinguished family, joint and double-jointed (okay, bad pun), was clearly too overwhelming for the pretty young British lady behind the counter, evident by her flustered look at having to handle a dozen tickets at one time and struggling to understand the different accents.

I noticed quickly that each of those Punjabis, from toddler to aged, had a British passport. What seemed to compound the young lady’s hassles was the fact that the elderly, dressed in typical Indian attire, couldn’t speak great English despite being in the UK for a long time. I watched, amused and admired, by the way she handled the situation. After checking all the passports and tickets, she let them all pass and took a…

It was the night India beat Pakistan to win the inaugural ICC World Twenty20 in South Africa. After wrapping up my ball-by-ball duties I headed out with a friend to pick up something to drink on the way to a colleague’s house.

It was getting close to 10.30 and we were worried the liquor shops would be shutting. We found a place on some seedy back lane and stopped the office car. My friend goes up to the hole in the wall and quickly places the order. There were a few chaps standing around the counter and I stood on the pavement.

Suddenly an old man stumbled out and faced me. Oh great, I thought. He sizes me up and stepped forward.

“India is great!” he cheers, reeking of the good stuff. "India won match!"

I have no option but to agree with him, but his next line is classic, after looking at me somewhat pitifully and extending his hand to shake mine.

“America … America also good ... but India is great!”

My friend hears this and turns around and grins goofily. He’s seen me confronted …

I commuted from home to work and for a year in Bombay before moving to Bangalore. That included a five-minute walk to the station, a wait of anywhere between two and ten minutes for the fast train, an 18 to 30-minute travel thereafter, if all went well, and anywhere from 15 to 25 minutes in an auto rickshaw from my stop to the office.

As you can imagine, a white guy in a compartment of a local train will draw attention. I won't go into the gory details of what it was like on a packed evening, or the foul stuff I would hear from the obligatory loafers, but there were some funny incidents during that year of traveling on the Bombay trains.

I was coming home one evening, from Andheri to Bombay Central, and met a friendly sardarji. Now I’m totally used to being gawked at when I step – or leap, as often the case was – into a first-class compartment and this time was no different. Except that said paape, in designer jeans and snazzy white and black t-shirt and carrying a couple large sho…

Okay, so I hear there's some interest in these pages. Apologies for not regularly updating them. Been travelling for work and had other stuff to sort out.

I've had to answer a lot of questions recently, while covering games in Delhi, Bangalore and Cochin, as to where I'm actually from, how I came to India, how I learnt Hindi, yadda yadda yadda ... but the most interesting one I got was 'whats the funniest incident you've had in India?'

Now there have been many, too many to recall even at the ripe old age of 26, but I'll try and sort out a few classics. Today on the way to work I caught an auto inside the Manipal Hospital compound as always (you never know what sort of autowala youre going to have to deal with each day here in Bangalore) and the chap who acknowledged my wish to go to MG Road with some sort of grunt looked normal enough. Except his auto chugged along at about 15 kilometres an hour down Airport Road as the rest of the world, cyclists included,…