I believe I’m in the same hotel as where it happened, but I have stayed in much worse places. If I was living here while I was at university I would never have left, but I’ll see how it goes. At the moment not being able to connect to the internet is a bigger deal. It’s down for a day. Or more. Time is hard to judge here. Five minutes can mean half an hour, so I might have left Chandigarh before the “back-end server problem” is fixed. Modern life is warped. Once food and water was satisfactory, but now it’s a room free of rodents and full of unlimited WiFi.

The stadium in Mohali, a suburb of Chandigarh, doesn’t seem to fit with the city. It is grand, imposing and rises on the same strip as a tent city, where people wash near the roads and sit round small fires to cook. The Punjab Cricket Association Ground looked immaculate and from the pavilion a shady line could be seen in the distance. It’s the start of the lower Himalayas, but there is as much chance of Sachin Tendulkar retiring 15 short of a world record as cold weather over the next week. It is hot, hazy and a much better place to be a spectator than a player.

***

Hindi isn’t the only Indian language that Brett Lee has been learning. When he sat down for a press conference at Mohali on Wednesday he offered the Punjab greeting sat-shri-akal. He even pronounced it properly, which impressed those who are more familiar to these parts. The rest was in English, but Lee’s small deeds and wide smiles go a long way to showing why he’s so popular in this country.