Column

It was perhaps the worst weekend of my life, if you don’t count my wife’s honeymoon. At the behest of MTV (a fortune 500 company), I was sent to Delhi. In Delhi, MTV has discontinued the practice of putting us up in hotels.

So, after a six-hour-long delayed flight in a low-cost airline (a trip like this is considered more dangerous than a trip to Bora-Bora, but a little less dangerous than a trip to Disneyland), we were arrested at the airport and put up in what was loosely called a guest house. I’m told the term guest house has evolved from the older ‘Guess House’, which in turn, emerged out of the original term ‘guess where duh house is?’

Now, when I was growing up, lengthy as that procedure was, houses had names such as ‘Sea-side’ or ‘Brighton’ or ‘Poonam’ even ‘Shiv Tirth.’ However our Delhi house was called ‘2 by 2 over 4 and 1’.

With absolute trepidation, we entered the Guest ...err…house. A young caretaker with great pain and sadness in his eyes showed us around the place. There were three rooms. Room one had 400 cardboard cartons in it and basically only allowed an overage 160-pound man to put the top two toes of his left foot inside. The only person who could have been accommodated would be the Tare Zameen Par star Darsheel Safary.

However, I’m told he’s put on 20 pounds since the movie released, which means he’s doubled his weight.

Room number two had no cartons, but was designed like a room from the Shah Jehan period. And just as it would be in the Shah Jehan period, it had no electricity. And any child historian will tell you that Alexander never bothered coming to Delhi at peak summer at 42 degrees, and instead carried on straight to Nepal because there was no electricity at that time. Alexander later became a Sherpa, an outstanding tour guide and a dinner companion.

The third room was in some kind of working order and had to bear the brunt of all the occupants, the number of them, when I went to sleep, totalled nine. But I was rudely awakened with the customary MTV greeting of a foot on my face. The guy who looked like Darsheel Safary at that time was the great middle-weight fighter Robert Duran (who wouldn’t have survived an hour in the guest house).