An evening with Jeffrey Archer

I was in Mumbai a couple of days ago and I happened to be in Landmark when I came to know that Jeffrey Archer was to come there in half an hour as a part of his promotional tour for his new book ‘A Prisoner of Birth’ I have not read a lot of his books but I admire some of his works. So I bought his book and joined a large bay of people waiting for him. Crowd erupted when his arrival was announced.

After the formalities, he started answering some FAQs, expecting them to come up that day also. While mentioning his initial struggle to get a publisher for ‘Not a penny more, not a penny less’ he compared himself with JK Rowling and said that he beats her on this one that he had to approach 18 publishers while Rowling had to visit only 16!

During Q&A, he lightened up a bit and endless topics were discussed. After a 2hr ride to Landmark from his hotel just 15km away, he was convinced that Indians have understood traffic rules in some whole other dimension which nobody else can understand. He said that he could have walked a lot faster, but would have been a lot sweatier so decided not to.

Being a purist, he is not happy with the whole T-20 and IPL hype. According to him, real cricket match is a test match….between India and England…….at Lord’s………when India is 37/7…….(after a lot of BOOs)ok 37/6. He narrated one incident when an Indian guy called him and wished to meet him over dinner. Archer tried to explain how famous he is and how his time is important. But the guy did not yield. So Archer asked his name and the guy said ‘My name is Rahul Dravid and my friend is Sachin Tendulkar’ He invited some more BOOs when he said that both of them can bat OK!

He mentioned that real success in India is when a book is sold on footpaths and traffic signals. Todays Pune Mirror runs a story about him. He was surprised when they presented him with a copy of his book from footpath. Apparently he was not aware that those are pirated copies.

When he announced that he would be signing the books, INDIAN within the INDIAN woke up and everybody started running towards the dais. After 15 mins and a lot of bickering, the crowd narrowed down to 7 queues and that was it! I got his autograph after an hour, but it was worth a wait.