YOU have seen the amusing television advertisement where Adam Gilchrist is recognised on an Indian street and is swarmed by an adoring crowd clamouring for a piece of the Australian wicketkeeper?
Brett Lee and Matthew Hayden will tell you they have experienced life imitating art and what you saw on television was nothing.
Yesterday morning in Bombay, Hayden went for the briefest of walks down the streets. It's something he can almost get away with under the cover of darkness, but in daylight the Tarzan-sized batsman stands out, literally.
"Mr Matt," they cried. "Hayden!" In an instant he was recognised and mobbed. The beaming Queenslander lapped it up, signing autographs, ruffling hair and joking with the crowd.
A few months back, Lee and his manager, Neil Maxwell, attempted to sneak down one of the back alleys in New Delhi for a look behind the curtains. After all, India is not a country to be experienced from the hotel. You have to swim out into the chaos of horns and cows, saris and sadhus, tiny temples and traffic, smells and sights. You have to wander the lanes where chai wallahs brew their milky sweet tea with extravagant ritual, cafes sell eight course curry lunches for $1 and the billion minor curiosities of life in this strange, intense and engrossing country.
Lee and Maxwell had not gone far into the bazaar when a storekeeper looked at the pair, then looked again. Recognition formed on his face. The bowler felt the cacophony of sounds go quiet as the man asked. "Brett Lee?" and then yelled in confirmation, "Brett Lee!"
In a moment his name was on a hundred lips and then a hundred more and a pressing crowd began to form, reaching out for a touch or just a glimpse. The pair were trapped in the alley and Maxwell had to fight to get out and get a car to facilitate their escape - just like in the Gilchrist advertisement.
"We never felt threatened, we were just overwhelmed by people being so nice," Lee said this week.
Then there was the time seven weeks ago when Lee was asked to do a sponsor's appearance in Bombay and got to experience a version of subcontinental Beatlemania with girls swooning and fainting, screaming and pleading.
"New Balance were doing a promotion and they asked me to do an in-store appearance," he said.
"You know in Australia you do it and you sign a few autographs, sit at a table, there's a nice orderly line and in half an hour you are out of there, no problem.
"So I go down to this store and I couldn't believe it. There were about 5000 people outside this store and it's so weird and I was driven through in this car and people were screaming and carrying on, throwing flowers and stuff and we just waited in the car for somebody to turn up and it didn't happen. Nobody was waiting."
So Lee waded into the crowd and somehow made it inside.
"They put some flowers around my neck and water on me, the whole blessing thing and it was great. It was impossible to go out and say hello to everyone so they got me a microphone and I said 'namaste' or hello to them."
This week in the foyer of the Australian Test team's Bombay hotel every pot plant and pillar has given cover for a group of giggling teenage girls, ready to swarm Lee should he appear. He smiles and handles it with grace, speaking gently to them and promising autographs when he has finished his business. He signs them all if he can.
All this and 'Binga' - as he is known - has never bowled a first-class delivery in India until last night.
Brett Lee's subcontinental superstardom may have more to do with his good looks and genuine charm, but it is also an indication of the regard Australian cricketers are held by sponsors and the people of the country.
There have been times when Australian commentators and columnists have wrung their hands over the international image of the team. The flint-eyed, win-at-all costs approach and aggressive in-your-face game has translated into some apparently ugly moments in the past.
However, the world champions of the long and short form of the game have lifted themselves above that, in India at least. Here their off-field strategies have been as successful as those on the field.
While the approach may not have been cooked up in a team meeting, its origins date back to Steve Waugh's urging of his charges to get out of the hotel and engage with the culture of the country. The former captain wanted his players to overcome the xenophobia of Australian cricket.
Waugh threw his resolve into the Udayan charity, a home and school for the children of lepers. It was his way of coping with the heartbreaking poverty and deformity that circles tourist hotels and shakes the confidence of so many who visit.
Australian cricketers began to utter a new mantra: we love the country, the people and the sights. Most mean it and in a perverse twist it has had commercial as well as spiritual rewards.
Last time he was here, Gilchrist was taken out by a charity organisation to see some of the underbelly: the barely pubescent girls stolen or sold from villages in Nepal and Bangladesh and trapped into prostitution. This time he will be announcing a new charity initiative.
Salil Sadanandan is the vice-president of marketing for Timex, India. He has watched the profile of our cricketers grow off the field.
These days Ricky Ponting, Shane Warne, Steve Waugh, Gilchrist and many of the others, including Lee, are used to sell products to the hundreds of millions of cricket fans.
"Australian cricketers are the flavour of the month, if you like, for Indian firms," Sadanandan says. "It is because the Australians are doing so well in cricket, but also because of the way the people see them and their love of the country.
"Steve Waugh led the way and now many of your cricketers have followed and do exemplary work in India and that has changed the way people think about Australians. They saw them as no-compromise blokes who were aggressive on the field and appreciated the athleticism, but now they see them as role models."
Michael Kasprowicz has packed the Indian Lonely Planet, the traveller's bible, so he can seek out more while here. On previous visits he may have been sent reeling by heatstroke in some games, but his diaries are full of stories and observations of life in India. He says the country has captured his heart.
Hayden and Justin Langer are a complementary coupling. Short and tall, intense and laid-back, but when they speak of India they find the same rhythm they have on a good day in the middle.
"I'd say for me that last time I was here was a life-changing experience, no doubt it put my life into much greater perspective," Langer says. "In Australia it is true we are the lucky country, we have every resource, we have freedom, fresh air, fresh food and despite all the poverty you see there is so much beauty in this country, no matter how poor people are they have a genuine happiness."
Hayden adds that there are as many people living in Bombay as the whole of Australia.
"It's mind blowing," Langer said. "It changes your life when you come to an environment when there's a billion people.
"And to see the poverty on the street that doesn't make sense to us in a lot of ways and you see it but you stay in a hotel like the Taj ..."
Hayden: "Opulence beyond belief."
Langer: "For me those contrasts really put my life into perspective."
While Waugh's charity has been organised, Langer took a more personal approach during the last visit.
"Up in our hotel rooms we get fruit delivered every day, so one morning I took the fruit out and the little kids from the streets would come and I gave them the fruit," he says.
Within days, collecting fruit from all his team-mates and food from the dressing rooms, the crowd of children began to follow the team bus from hotel to ground, always waiting with a smile for Mr Langer.
The Australians use the cultural encounters as part of their broader cricketing strategy.
"We have open discussions in the team about the experiences we've had before and talk about the on-field perils we can look out for," Langer said.
"But also the great opportunities we can look forward to - there's a lot of great things to look at in India and the opportunities we've got in the next six or seven weeks, rather than saying it's going to be such a tough tour, I think it's going to be an awesome tour."
Lee fell in love with India when he toured here as a 17-year-old schoolboy. He is learning to speak Hindi and has delighted fans at appearances by uttering a few words.
In the past, flicking through the mad world of Indian television, you would see Ponting or the like on the screen, speaking fluent Hindi in a voice that was clearly not their own.
This month Lee will do a television campaign where he is speaking the native language.
This year he made an appearance at the Bollywood film awards and he was even linked with a local actress. Timex passed over the Sachin Tendulkars and Harbhajan Singhs of cricket and chose Lee as its one and only brand ambassador.
"Brett understands Indian ways and culture and enjoys it and like he keeps saying he is passionate about it," Sadanandan says.
"Unless he is a very, very good actor, I totally believe him."
- PETER LALOR