@extends can't be indented, you can't put anything before it even whitespace.

I erroneously added the indents while pasting the code block above. The actual template code does not have any indents. Actually this is the first line in the template file with no indentation at all.

Other template files which use same master are working fine. If I rename this template file, change the View::make() call accordingly and then revert it back to original, it would probably start working. Not sure why this is happening.

Great! that was spot on. I was editing on vim in linux environment, I hadn't expected BOM to interfere.

:set nobomb before saving did the trick.

Thanks a lot Gergely. Laravel community is awesome!