‘MOST OF MY FANS IN INDIA ARE WOMEN UNDER AGE 30. I’M NOT COMPLAINING’

What do you do when you top your class? Give a little whoop of joy and call home to share the good news, right? Well, your favourite author does exactly the same!

Sitting in the back seat of the black sedan that took him from the airport to Taj Bengal on Friday, Metro got a rare glimpse of the family man behind the master storyteller.

"No. 1 in Canada, did you say?" Lord Jeffrey Archer asked his personal assistant Alison, who is holding fort in London while he is on a six-day-six-city tour of India, launching Mightier than the Sword, the fifth title in The Clifton Chronicles (published by Pan Macmillan). With Friday's figures, he is now No.1 in four countries - Australia, India, the UK and Canada. No wonder the big smiles and celebratory whoops.

"Could you tell the children and Mary?" he told Alison next, referring to his wife of 48 years. He's mighty proud of his wife too, it became evident while he chatted with us and when he addressed a gathering at City Centre Salt Lake later in the evening.

And Lord Archer, though not (yet) the captain of the English cricket team, is batting big for the modern Indian woman. "Thirty years back, all the women in this country were in the national dress and were subservient, with few exceptions. The new generation is the most exciting I have ever seen. And when you ask about inspiration, they can be inspired by my wife. She went to Oxford at the age of 16, got a first class honours degree, taught at Oxford, taught at Cambridge, became chairman of Cambridge University's Hospital, the Queen made her a Dame, she's now chairman of the Science Museum... so I say to every woman out there, get out and beat those men into the ground!" he bellowed to huge applause, and not just from his largely female audience.

"At 74, one can't complain if so many ladies come to see you, especially if most of them are under 30," he had quipped when we asked him about his hectic tours.

Among the Lord's ladies on Friday was the mother-daughter duo of Sujata Chatterjee and Suprava Ghosh. "What I loved was that he talked about the upward mobility of women in India. He also focused on how we can improve. We got to know a lot about his personal life and the biographical elements in his books," said mom Sujata, who teaches English at Bangabasi College. Daughter Suprava was struck by his wise words. "I learnt that you have to suffer in order to succeed in life, be it the master storyteller, be it me or be it anyone," said the Techno India student.

Coming to the current series he is writing, Lord Archer said Emma Clifton, one of the principal characters, was based on his wife. "So don't be surprised if Emma becomes a Dame in the next book," he chuckled.

Speaking of the next book, he revealed that Sebastian, Emma and Harry's son, will fall in love with an Indian girl in London and travel to India for the sake of love. How very Raj-Simran you might think, but don't you dare mention Bollywood to Lord Archer!

"They steal my stories!" he complained and made it clear that he didn't quite care for the Bollywood kind of films.

He has his sights set on Hollywood, though. His team is meeting three top production houses in the US on March 21 with a proposal for a television series based on The Clifton Chronicles. And he wants his team to meet the Hollywood people this month, when he's ruling the bestselling charts.

That's the other thing we learnt about Lord Archer this Friday. That he loves numbers. Being "No. 1" in four countries, tracking the number of reviews on his Kindle to calculate actual sales ("just multiply by 100, no one's worked that one out yet") to pointing out how one in 1,000 aspiring writers gets published and one in 1,000 published writers makes it to the bestseller list and one in 1,000 bestsellers becomes No. 1, he has a special knack for number crunching. And the figure that brought the house down? "Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird and my Kane and Abel together have sold less than Fifty Shades of Grey!"

In between cracking up the audience and offering them writing tips (practise as hard as a ballet dancer has to; read and read well) Archer the cricket buff kept checking the score for the India-West Indies match, still maintaining that England would win the World Cup. The audience laughed and he laughed with them.

The last laugh belonged to Vineeta Modi, who picked Archer over Dhoni's match-winning innings! "I am an avid cricket follower but today I chose Jeffrey. It was funny when he said that his wife would not believe it if she heard this," giggled the businesswoman from Ballygunge.

Jeffrey Archer is my favourite writer because.... Tell ttmetro@abpmail.com