"The investor was Vodafone, a British mobile-telephony giant. It paid about $1.5 billion for 10% of Bharti Tele-Ventures, buying 5.7% from Warburg Pincus, a private-equity firm, which has now left the business and booked a fabulous profit. Vodafone acquired the rest of its stake by investing in the Mittal family holding company, Bharti Enterprises. Bharti is generally reckoned to have got a pretty full price.
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The deal was in part a consequence of a long-delayed victory in one of the war's protracted battles: to persuade the government to lift the "cap" on foreign investment in telecommunications, from 49% to 74%. Mr Mittal says that even after the Vodafone investment Bharti's foreign ownership would not have breached the 49% limit, although SingTel of Singapore is also a big investor, owning 31%.

In keeping with the Euphoric expectations, India's telecommunications minister has set a target of 250m telephone connections---200m of them mobile---by the end of 2007. There are, however, sceptics. They argue that cities in India are already close to mobile-phone saturation and that, without big deregulation of the rural market, and investment in infrastructure there, it will be impossible to maintain the rapid growth. At present, mobile networks reach no more than 25-30% of India's population. Mr Mittal, of course, is at the optimistic end of the argument, foreseeing "a big hockey-stick effect"---ie, an almost vertical curve on the graph. He expects new connections to climb to 5m a month, as happened in China, and reach 300m in total by the end of 2010, by when China will have 600m.

Mahesh Uppal, a telecoms consultant, says that Mr Mittal's particular talent is combining entrepreneurship with political skill. Mr Deol praises his combination of vision---he's "a big-picture man"---with the ability to delegate. The big picture, for now, is another "disruptive business model" that would give a would-be serial entrepreneur "the next big fix". As yet, however, it is only a vivid sketch, waiting for the detail."