/> Cloud 9 is no longer John Abraham's residence. He has moved to a higher plane....Or perhaps a road-borne image would be more appropriate..considering John, accompanied by Bipasha just attended the the MotoGP at Malaysia.

Back in Mumbai on Monday night, John could barely contain his excitement. "Do you know what attending the Grand Prix means for a wheels-freak like me?

I was able to go up right to the starting grid where the mo-bikes are positioned to take off for the race. And I got to shake hands with the legendary racer Marco Melandri!! It was just such a wonderful experience.

I can't tell you what it meant to me. It was like shaking hands with Dhoni just before he gets on the field to hit a century."

Now John has more excitement in store. He heads for Rome for the Rome Film Festival where his new film No Smoking is being premiered.

"That's the new excitement born out of a new challenge that I created for myself. I love walking on the untrodden path," says John. "My two most passionate attachments in life are bikes and movies. And I like to ride the defiant route. That's why I did No Smoking. It won't be wrong to call it my most defiant film so far. It's non-conventional, as I like my films to be. But it's also very entertaining."

John will attend the Rome premiere on 24th October and heads back to Mumbai while director Anurag Kashyap stays back for the rest of the screenings until the 26th.

"What will I wear?" John pre-empts my next question. "Well I can't go bare-chested because it will be very cold in Rome. And it won't be an achkan because I have just one of those and I wore it at the Oscars when I went there for Water. But my designer Narendra Kumar Ahmed has lined up a series of clothes for me. So I'll be wearing one of his formal suits."

Nervous excitement about the most unusual role in his career?

"Not quite," says John. "The excitement persisted all through the making of No Smoking. I was doing something I had never done before. Now regardless of how well it does at the boxoffice I think I stood up capably to the challenge of doing something so unpredictable. Yeah I like what I've tried to do in this film."