My Beri-beri told me that it was 10 degrees in Delhi but I was already feeling chilly when the Jet Airways' 777 was still on the sweltering Mumbai Airport tarmac.



Maybe it was because it was a Sunday morning flight, which meant getting up at 6am to pack and check out while my colleagues were still snoring their heads off in their plush beds in the Narriman Trident.

But I think it was more the fact that we were still roaming the streets of Mumbai at 3am that night.

The dinner, earlier, at the Iranian briyani place across the road from Leopold's Cafe was pretty good but the place was a bit dingy. A friend said it reminded him of Peshawar, where he flunked his medical studies.

He was relatively fluent in Hindi though, which was a great help in getting around.

Nevertheless our search for raunchy nocturnal activities turned out to be a limp sausage.

Trying his best to remember his past, the best our consultant (15 years as resident of Mumbai) was able to come out with was this dive called Zombie or something.

After a few minutes waiting for him to do his recce, he came back and reported that there was good music and quite a few hot-looking chicks hanging around the bar.

OK - it sounded promising, so all of us trooped into the club.

Music sounded good, probably Indian techno with a good bass beat but damn, the women looked really tall, don't they?

Thinking that they can't all be expat women hanging out there, we scurried to the smoking corner - and the loo area, where the lights were brighter - just to be sure.

Yup - they were shemales.

That blithering idiot couldn't tell a pondan from a pretty lady, could he?

After hanging around the place for a while, I got groped, in a somewhat polite manner, by someone ("she" was cute-looking, to be fair) and we decided to call it a night.

So anyway back to that shiny new Boeing, I was a bit groggy and the looooong queue going through airport security didn't help my mood much. And they confiscated my lighter - lucky for me it was a cheap disposable.

Anyway, the air hostess was nice and pretty but I noticed that she was spending some time being gedik with these two blokes about one seat down across the aisle from me.

They were young good-looking guys carrying out a conversation with a third guy seated in front of me. And two air hostesses were hovering around them at all times.

Well, I didn't pay too much attention to them - I took them to be some rich kids because they kept yammering about how things were in the US - and simply dozed off.

So when we landed and all of us were preparing to exit the plane, I was queued just behind these 3 gentlemen who were joined by these two ladies who were seated on the other aisle.

Then as we went down, I saw this crowd forming at the foot of the stairway. All armed with pen, paper and cameras.

The crowd, mostly ground maintenance crew working at the Delhi airport, swarmed around the two guys asking for autographs and taking pictures.

That's when it dawned on me that these guys must be movie stars.

One young skinny guy, seeing that one hunk was about to pick up his bag after signing a few autographs, just grabbed the guy's hold-all and sprinted to the tarmac bus to deposit it safely there - just so he could get the guy's autograph when he eventually boarded the bus.

Me? I just made my way to the bus, sat there quietly as it filled up and then whispered to a guy holding on to the ceiling straps.

Cipan: "Excuse me, but who are those two guys? Are they famous?"

Excited passenger: "Oh yes - they are Bollywood stars. The big one is John Abraham and the smaller one is Dino Morea. They are famous."

Cipan: "Oh. And what about the ladies? Are they stars too?"

Excited passenger: "Oh no, they are just girlfriends. Nobody famous."

Right.

So that's how I shared a flight with two Bollywood hunks and never even suspected it.

Here's some Dino Morea eye candy ...



The whole thing had me wondering in my hotel bed that night,

"Oh why God, why didn't you make it Katrina Khaif and Aishwarya Rai?"

*sob