Last night Rahul Dravid excused himself early from the dining table.

"Have to bat all day tomorrow," he said.

After scoring his maiden Test hundred against Pakistan on day 2 of the third and final Test on Wednesday, one wonders whether the India vice-captain writes his own scripts these days.

If that's true then this Test is surely heading India's way.

At the end of the first day, he announced that India had to bat big and bat once in the Test. With a lead of 118 runs in the first innings, India is already on top and in with a great chance to seize their first Test series win this side of the Wagah border.

According to Dravid, if India bats through a good part of day three, Pakistan will find it very hard with the shadow of Anil Kumble coming into play on day four of the Test.

He accepted that batting in the last session of day one and on the second morning was tough.

"When you have 16-17 overs for the day to end, the bowlers come hard at you. You have to work hard through those innings, especially after I let myself down in the earlier innings at Lahore. I wanted to correct that," he said.

This morning, Dravid's batting didn't exactly look well-oiled. The grammar in his play was missing as he just decided to hang around with Parthiv Patel. It's rare that he has scores of 6, 33 and zero in a Test series on foreign soil.

Before the series began, while discussing his batting, he had said the greatest challenge for him was getting up in the morning and not feeling good about the day ahead and yet go ahead and get some runs.

"I try to fight through days when my timing is not right. These days are the benchmark for me. A friend told me during my Ranji days that the greatest test of a batsman is if he can play the ugliest hour in the game and get an ugly fifty or a hundred," he had said.

That friend will probably be smiling today. 

Dravid admitted that his job was made a tad easier by the quick scoring of VVS Laxman and then Sourav Ganguly. 

"I just had to play all day. With runs coming in I was not worried at all. After Parthiv and I played through to lunch the tough part of the day was over." he said.

His returns with the bat as skipper have been pedestrian by his own standards and he is well aware of that.

"I knew I would be asked about my captaincy. It is too early to form an opinion after just three Tests in a stand-in position," he argued.

He summed up the Pakistan bowling when he said that there were two quality balls from Shoaib Akhtar and they fetched the wickets of Sachin Tendulkar and VVS Laxman.

For the rest of the day Pakistan's bowling faltered, came good in patches but on the whole disappointed yet again.

A Pakistani journalist, who was once called a buffoon by former England skipper Michael Atherton, asked Dravid if he is thinking about breaking Brian Lara's record score of 400 runs.

Pat came the reply: "If I have to score 400 runs, it will have to be a six-day or a timeless Test."