• But is it a job done?

Not yet. It's just a job started. I think we have a long, long way to go. What we have is, well, we've built the right building blocks to try and make it a success. Whether it'll be a success or not, time will tell.

• You're an entrepreneur?

Yes.

• You were selling cigarettes. Not a nice thing.

Correct. I agree. We have to do something to make a living.

• Cigarettes to cricket. How did it happen?

It all started in 1994, when I partnered with ESPN to launch the ESPN channel in India. The challenge out there was how to make it a business model.

• ESPN was very new at that point.

It hadn't launched, and when you're planning to launch ESPN and partner with them, the whole issue was, how do you make a sports channel work in India when there is no pay environment? If people don't pay for a channel, how is it that a channel can survive? Everywhere else, you have paying subscribers, who pay for a channel, and on that basis a channel survives. Advertising alone can't make it sustain itself, so the only thing we thought about was . . .

• And you were not yet 30 then?

I wasn't 30 then, I was 29, just come back fresh from America; studied; worked at Philip Morris and joined the family business; had just done a joint venture with Disney at that time.

... contd.