"It’s a bright day here," ring out Geoff Boycott’s brisk tones. "A tough match ahead and, if the Prince of Kolkata wants to become the King of Kolkata, he’d better pull up his socks." The medium-sized, 29-year-old Vikram Sathaye strides onstage, with a microphone in hand, a hat perched cockily on his clean-shaven head, alternating Boycott’s verbosity with Navjot Singh Sindhu’s famous one-liners: "You can take the lion out of Punjab, but you can never take Punjab out of the lion!"

Stand-up comic, Vikram Sathaye, has got his pulse on the nerve of the world of the willow, right down to the way famous batsmen take their stance. At a recent awards function, the cricket fraternity was in splits at his rendering of their walk, their wild swings and their wicket, wicket ways. He spared no one — not even Sunil Gavaskar, the original little master and his rolling walk or Sachin Tendulkar’s blinking concentration and soft, child-like accents.

With a management degree under his belt, Vikram makes for an unlikely entertainer. In a short span of time, he changed jobs from the Professional Management Group, MTV and Metalite to launch his own concern — The Big Picture Company — that dabbles in movie, music and sports marketing.

Like most cricket fanatics, Vikram’s been glued to the game from childhood. "Luckily for me, the cricketers love my digs," he says. "I am not just imitating them or reproducing their voices. That is passé. I do an original spoof of their styles.My big moment came when Sony noticed me and approached me to take part in the World Cup Launch campaign last year. That’s when my ‘extraa innings’ began."