"I don't live like that," he said. "What's done is done. And at the time, $40 for every one of my subscribers sounded like a good figure." When Microsoft made its bid earlier this year, Bhatia had 10 million subscribers to Hotmail, the world's biggest E-mail service brand. Now, there are 22 million in 270 countries and three million more come every month. In an industry where the priority is, to use its parlance, `gathering eyeballs', Bhatia holds the biggest collection in the world.

Though he has sold out, Bhatia remains in charge of Hotmail and is closely involved with the business development of the Microsoft Network. Two months from now, he expects to launch a free instant messaging service on Hotmail that will compete directly with ICQ (`I seek you'), the Israeli product that was recently acquired by America Online. By the end of this year, he will follow the lead of the search directory Yahoo! and launch local Hotmails.

The territories of Japan, Germany, the UK and Australia have been targeted for this year. Next year, Hotmail will move into 19 other countries, in their own languages. But not India. It just isn't ready yet.

Bhatia is convinced that he could not have created Hotmail in India either. "Look, we were backed by Draper Fischer Jurvetson and Menlo Ventures. Would any venture capitalist in India have backed a service that gave e-mail accounts away for free?" It is rumoured that Bhatia lost all his independence when he took recourse to the Microsoft umbrella, at a time when he was yet to break even. The rumour earned some support from the fact that he turned up uncharacteristically clad in a suit and tie.

He used to be seen in jeans and a T-shirt. But he denies that he has either gone corporate or fallen prey to the strange disease that turns most senior Microsoft executives into animated press releases. "I still have complete freedom with Hotmail products," he says. "It's just that in Microsoft, there are different ways of getting the same thing done."

Nevertheless, it must be slightly uncomfortable for Bhatia, who migrated to the US 10 years ago convinced that he had to do something that would "change the world".