British Indian actor Sanjeev Bhaskar had to put up with a three-month cold war in school because of racial prejudice.

The 44-year-old star of the hit sitcom Goodness Gracious Me still remembers how his schoolmates snubbed him during the race riots in London when he was 17.

'Both the Asians and the whites in school stopped talking to me because they expected me to take sides,' he tells Life! in a recent telephone interview from his home in Woodford, north-east of London, where he lives with his 42-year-old wife Meera Syal, a stepdaughter and a son.

'I refused to link with either side because I thought they were all stupid. So everyone stopped talking to me.'

Three decades later, he still takes racial prejudice seriously in the projects that he chooses to do. His latest gig is being the host of India With Sanjeev, a four-part BBC documentary, which debuted on BBC Knowledge on SingTel mio TV Channel 30 last Saturday.

Born to a factory supervisor dad and a bookkeeper mum in London, Bhaskar immersed himself in India's rich culture for the series.

He first caught the public's eye with Goodness Gracious Me in 1998 and later produced the satirical sitcom-cum-talkshow The Kumars At No. 42, in which he co-starred with his wife Syal.

In his latest documentary series, Bhaskar, who also speaks Hindi and Punjabi, does everything from drinking camel milk to judging an Indian beauty pageant for married women.

Although he has visited India about six times since he was a child, filming in the subcontinent for this show has been a memorable experience.

He recalls one episode in which he retraces his parents' move from Pakistan to India during the partition of India in 1947.

'I became witness to my father's childhood. He drew me a map of the places, landmarks and roads from what he remembered from 60 years ago. I found the village that he was born in, and everything was still as he had described it. It was very strange but very moving,' he says.

The realism of this programme is a leap from his signature sitcoms, which take a satirical look at the idiosyncrasies of Indians in Britain.

But the easygoing actor, who was named by The Observer newspaper as one of 50 funniest acts in British comedy, is funny without even trying, fishing out amusing anecdotes from his latest production.

He recalls laughingly: 'For the beauty pageant, I had to ask a contestant what she would do if she discovered one morning that her husband had turned into a fridge.

'It was a question that was written down beforehand, I wasn't trying to be funny.'

This article was first published in The Straits Times on Oct 6, 2008.