Worcestershire are set to go on flood watch after the abandonment of their match with Nottinghamshire at rain-battered New Road yesterday.

As soon as this tour of Sri Lanka is done next Saturday, Kevin Pietersen is off to the Indian Premier League. He is excited about the prospect of playing for Delhi Daredevils, less so about returning to England early from the tournament to play in a County Championship match which also coincides with his son's birthday.

Could the BBC have found a more imperial presenter for Empire than Jeremy Paxman? I doubt it, frankly. He's been burnished by years in the Newsnight chair to a high gloss of viceregal self-assurance. As the opening sequence of his new series demonstrated, he can even arch an eyebrow at British imperium itself: "How did such a small country get such a big head?" he asked scornfully as he began an episode devoted to the British exercise of power. The big head, it turned out, was a necessary condition rather than a consequence. In India, fewer than 6,000 British officials held dominion over 200 million people, an improbability achieved partly by classic divide-and-rule techniques but also by means of a dazzling confidence trick. Visiting Government House in Calcutta – an imposing relic of Imperial India – Paxman argued that the classical facade was an instrument of authority. By looking as if they were entitled to run the country the British ensured that they would continue to do so: "It helps to explain that arrogant, self-satisfied look you see on the face of so many British imperialists," said Paxman, who more than once appeared to be offering us a helpful reconstruction of a Victorian sense of manifest destiny. He's grand enough to interview a maharajah in his palace and make it look as if he's the one giving the audience.

Indian police were last night investigating whether the apparent suicide of a senior executive of scandal-hit Japanese firm was related to the company’s problems back home.

As the desert sand settled around Alastair Cook's sterling century yesterday, the attention moved sharply to his opening partner. It has never shifted far from Kevin Pietersen since a balmy day at the Oval in 2005 when he plundered Australia but there is the undoubted sense now that he is playing for his one-day career.

Each week we invite three companies to offer us their best deal for a specific holiday. Today: a two-week hiking holiday in Nepal.

Homai Vyarawalla, who died on 15 January at the age of 98, was widely acknowledged to be India's first woman photojournalist. She took photographs of key events that would have a decisive impact on Indian history, including the meeting where leaders voted for the plan for India's partition. She also photographed the first flag-hoisting ceremony, at Red Fort on 15 August 1947, the departure of Lord Mountbatten from India and the funerals of Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and Lal Bahadur Shastri.

Liverpool launched their first football academy in India yesterday.

Nine months after India hosted the Commonwealth Games, companies around the world are still owed tens of millions of pounds in outstanding payments. They say they have run into a brick wall in dealing with officials in Delhi, where the issue had become entangled in a wide-ranging criminal investigation.

It's been dubbed The Hangover of Bollywood, full of F-word expletives, flatulence, right royal cock-ups and a bunch of dufus friends who never seem to get it right in love, money or work. Delhi Belly, produced by Aamir Khan, one of India's biggest movie stars, and starring his nephew Imran Khan, had its international premiere last night at the launch of the London Indian Film Festival (LIFF).

Imoved to Mumbai in November 2006. The girl I had been seeing in Delhi came to the city to work for a marketing firm. She brought me along with her books and bags and bric-à-brac from Rohini, in west Delhi. I had quit my job with Time magazine at the start of the year to finish a novel. Instead I had wasted my time doing little freelance jobs for my former employer. Unless I left Delhi – too many journalists, too many stories – I would never get this novel done. Going to Kolkata was the original plan; a friend said he might rent out his place near Minto Park. But then the girl came to Mumbai.