'Sourav (now) thinks there's value in Kartik. At the end of the day, it's the player's value realised by market forces'

It all happens in the game of cricket.

• Did you imagine this becoming so big and ending this way?

I dreamt about it. Let's put it this way. This was a dream that went back 13 years. But actually seeing it unfold before your own eyes and actually seeing it happen was something beyond my wildest dreams.

• And lots of people have been waiting for you to go very wrong.

I agree, and they will continue to do that. It's part of life, and that's something one must take in one's stride.

• So you now quite look forward to getting immortalised as the father of IPL, a young father.

• Or the uncle of IPL. The father has to be (BCCI chief) Mr (Sharad) Pawar.

That's right, he is the father. He's the one who actually green-lighted it. He gave me a free hand to go out and do this. He had the wisdom and also the courage, I would say, to actually say that we will do it and this is something that can be done.

• 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 . . .

... contd.