I first heard of Mukesh Ambani, the Chairman of Reliance Industries Ltd. (RIL), in early 2004–a couple of years after he launched Reliance Communications (RCOM) for his terminally-ill father. Reliance had struggled to enter the mobile telecoms market in India in the mid-1990s, when the government first auctioned spectrum. But in 2002 it obtained, through administrative process, a nationwide 800 …
