Sunil Mittal was born in Ludhiana in Punjab, a city known for manufacturing knitwear, hosiery and motor parts. He graduated in 1976, at the time of the Emergency. His home life was unusual, in that he was not part of a joint household.

?We were more like a western nuclear family. My parents were both Punjabis, but my mother was from a Kshatriya family and my father was a Bania.? Punjabi Banias were mostly shrewd traders, shopkeepers and small industrialists. So the bride was considered a bad match, who would bring no dowry. ?My father was a student politician and my mother was in the audience when he was giving a speech. They had a love marriage. My father?s family were not happy and they almost disowned him. I never knew my uncles or my cousins. My father would have been cashed in at a higher level. In his time, it was important you came from the right family background.? His father Sat Paul Mittal later became a Congress MP in the Rajya Sabha and, a prominent parliamentarian, who campaigned internationally on matters such as apartheid, population growth and social development. ?When he did well as a politician, some of his family came to meet him again.?

Although Sunil Mittal?s father was in politics rather than in business, many of the people in the family?s social group were involved in trading or manufacturing. Ludhiana was one of the busiest commercial centres in Punjab, a place where it was usual to be trying to set up one thing or another. At the fledgling bicycle parts factory in his early twenties, Mittal ?dreamed of owning a large-sized business entity,? and knew it was not the ideal industry for him. ?I saw it as a means to an end, and knew it would not be enough. We manufactured special high-tensile-strength crankshafts for export to Germany. I did a few other things in my twenties?trading in copper, zinc, zip fasteners. I wanted to be important in my sphere. Even though I was not even a speck in the copper market, I wanted to be in a position to decide the market price one day.? He dreamed in numbers and in big ideas.

?I have always been a capitalist in my mind, but misery and poverty were at our doors?you could hardly not see them?and my father was a politician during a socialist time. So we were socially connected. I was uncomfortable with the control or permit raj, being told what you can and can?t do. When I was starting out, all the prospects were with a handful of business families. People would say to me: ?Take an agency for gas or cars. Do some work for Birla or Tata. Your father?s a politician, you?ll have a comfortable living.? I didn?t want to do that, I wanted more, and I thought that if you look to the US or to Europe, in each decade there is a business idea that breaks the mould.?

I began to import portable generators from Suzuki in Japan?the sort that in another country might be used for a picnic or a party or an ice cream stand. In India I thought we would need them in homes when the mains electricity failed, which happened all the time in those days. It was hard work and pain from 1976 to 1982, but it was the first time I tasted success. You could put that on my tombstone. I was able to buy a good car and an apartment. I had revenues of $100,000 a year, which at that time was really a lot of money. In 1983, generators were banned. It was decided by the government that they should be manufactured in India, because of the import substitution policy. Birla and Shriram (two large, established and politically well-connected business houses) got letters of intent (from the bureaucracy in New Delhi) and the ban on imports was immediate, even though they hadn?t started to manufacture any generators.?

Sunil Mittal laughed, as if he still could not believe it, and hunched forward in his chair. His hair was closely cropped, black flecked with grey. ?So I picked up my bag and went to Japan. God has guided my life. I looked at the street markets, seeing what was there. Some of the time I took an interpreter with me, other times I got by using English. I considered importing VCRs. I went to Korea, went to Taiwan. I looked at Teflon coated products, at sports shoes, even at plastic tents. In Taipei at a trade fair, I saw push button phones. I went to visit the factory of a man named Richard Wu and signed an MOU with him immediately to import the parts and assemble them in India. Only rotary phones existed at that time, and I knew these would be popular. We called the company ?Mitbrau,? which sounded German?foreign products sold better?but it stood for Mittal Brothers as I was working with my brothers by then. We sold about 10,000 phones a year, with a 300 or 400% margin. I realised I loved telecom. We started to make answering machines, did a tie-up with Siemens and imported cordless phones and fax machines from Korea. Then the mobile phone market opened up, and we bid as the outsiders. We had to go through courts, litigation and challenges?I?m compressing a lot of things here?but we ended up winning the Delhi licence and launched Bharti Airtel in 1995. The rest is history?

?(Pages 199-201)