During most of the interview, Vajpayees fingers were firmly crossed. He was real cute in his white dhoti-kurta and black waistcoat. In the pink of health too (rosy-cheeked), calm and assured. RajivShukla (once again) was tougher on him than he had been on Sonia Gandhi; but, so as to distance himself from his own questions, he prefaced nearly every single one with: ``your opponents...say, vipaksh ka kehna/mannana hai.....''Vajpayee recited the `issues-before-the-nation-in-the-election' like they were someone else's poetry; he spoke smoothly, convincingly even, but there wasn't a single new thought in anything he said. That leaves us with just one puzzle: why does the Prime Minister feel compelled to recite a poem of his own writing each time he is interviewed?

Immediately after watching the PM, a big white fog descended on the screen. You have grown up believing fog should be grey as the English sky but when it is produced by a machine in Mumbai, it is definitely the colour of clean cotton wool. Through the Dhund (STAR Plus), a shady character becomes visible, standing in profile, lit up by two fire torches. Heathcliff or Amar to you. In the Indian context Amar Prem would be quite anappropriate name for Wuthering Heights (don't you think?) so why did they name it Dhund? Haven't got the foggiest...(sorry, sorry).

Ahem. Right. Back to Amar. A taciturn sort of bloke our Heathcliff, with a hearing problem : when our guide, Sameer, first meets him, he politely, says ``Namaste''. ``You can hear her,'' replies Amar; when Sameer tries to make a monologue into a dialogue by asking: ``Who lives here with you?'' Amar answers: ``I want to go to sleep.'' Huh?

Now for the climax: Sameer espies the photograph of a woman and though she's barely beautiful, he stares as if mesmerised. She haunts his dreams. Next morning he stands behind an open door and his mouth falls open (it happens to mouths when they have nothing better to do). Behold, before his eyes, the back of a woman. Motionless as a still life. Suddenly, she stirs, turns towards the light streaming through the windows and the camera closes in to capture her face and freezes at the sight: one long lock of hair, a small nose, a pout of amouth, half-closed eyes. It is she, it is she, the photograph: Pooja `Catherine' Bhatt. Looking as saintly as Joan of Arc. That too in her first television role. At the end of episode 1, the best performance in Dhund had come from the fog machine.

And now for question time India: when will we have a channel which plays cricket and only cricket in the morning, cricket in the evening, cricket in the summertime? And winter and spring and monsoon too. Let's start one, c'mon. How can we fail? Every other channel is showing it and presumably cashing in on it, otherwise, why would they telecast it right? Every week, there's cricket on a channel you least expect to see it on. Just over a fortnight ago, Sony had joined into the game with the AIWA Cup and Singapore Sling or whatever it was called. Last week one sports channel was repeating the World Cup, while the other had the Prince of Calcutta conquering Toronto and suddenly you found yourself watching Australia A playing maidan cricket with India A. Name thechannel. Give you three guesses: 1.Sony (wrong); 2.DD (couldn't be more wrong); 3.Zee (nice try: it would if it could). Give up? Ans: AXN Action TV.

I mean, really, is this fair: yeh kahan ka insaaf? When you tune into AXN, you are looking for action: meat heads and meat balls being ground into mince by knuckle-dusters. Not a cricket ball wobbling like it had Delhi-belly. Please, somebody, any body, begin a cricket channel, name it B&B (figure it out for yourselves) and go to sleep to wake up richer.