"Just one minute I was telling him to wait, and the moment I left in the other car, exactly after one minute it started. Then he realized that there are some times when if you don't do anything, things settle on their own accord. But it is difficult.

"A man goes to a cocktail party. When the waiter brings round the salmon rolls, the lady standing next to him bends over to pick one up and loses her glass eye amongst the hors d'oeuvres. Before she can do anything, the man picks up a salmon roll containing the glass eye and eats it.

"A week later he finds himself suffering from severe constipation. The doctors cannot seem to cure it so they decide to get him into the operating theater to stick a tube inside him and see what the problem is.

"The doctor takes one look down the tube, looks up at the patient and says, 'You really don't trust me, do you?'

"And moreover, Prateek, what was the hurry? We were all enjoying! It was such a beautiful joke that without a single punchline to it people were bursting in laughter. I have received many letters: 'What happened that day? Even when you are telling a beautiful joke, the laughter never goes so deep and so total. But that day neither were you telling a joke, nor had we heard anything, but the laughter was happening!'

"Recently some tapes other than Watergate have been discovered by archaeologists, and they shed light on Daniel in the lion's den.

"You must know the old story of Saint Daniel who was thrown into a den of lions because he refused to betray his faith. He came out of the den unharmed. It was thought to be a great miracle. But this recent discovery by the archaeologists says something else. It says, the tapes reveal, that at the precise moment when the lion was going to eat Daniel, Daniel quickly grabbed one of the lion's ears and whispered into it, 'Don't eat me! Remember, after dinner come the speeches!'

"So there was no hurry – only a speech was going to come after. Even if the microphone was not going to work, there was no harm at all."