Engaging India is an online column analysing the issues, trends and forces behind the business and politics shaping India and its impact on the world. Engaging India appears Thursday mornings exclusively on FT.com India, a dedicated online section on India, and is written by Jo Johnson, the Financial Times' South Asia bureau chief; Amy Yee, New Delhi correspondent; and Joe Leahy, Mumbai correspondent.
It was India's version of "Gone in 60 Seconds" - the Nicholas Cage film of eight years ago in which he played a character who has to steal 50 cars in 24 hours.
When Anil Ambani, the billionaire businessman, launched the initial public offering of his company, Reliance Power, this week, he received enough orders to cover the $3bn listing within one minute of its opening.
By the end of the first 24 hours of the four-day offering, the company had demand for more than 10 times the amount of shares on offer.
To outsiders, an equity deal of a company that builds power plants would rarely generate much of buzz beyond professional investment circles.
But in India, the Reliance Power offering has eclipsed all other news - even the row with Australia over cricket field manners, which only last week had taken on the dimensions of an international crisis.
The secret to the excitement is the Reliance name; no other company is quite able to capture the imagination of the Indian retail investor in the same way.
Founded in 1958 by a renegade textile entrepreneur, Dhirubhai Ambani, the group's shares are among the most widely held of any company in the world, with an investor base of 3m.
Indian families have made so much money on Reliance Industries that they have come to idolise Dhirubhai Ambani in the same way Hong Kong investors regard that city's richest man, Li Ka-shing, who they call "Superman".
After Dhirubhai's death in 2002, the family empire was split between brothers Mukesh and Anil, who remain fierce rivals. But the shares of their respective groups have continued to do well, swept up by a four-year bull-run in India's stock market.
Mukesh listed his refinery subsidiary, Reliance Petroleum, in 2006, attracting a record response from retail punters and now Anil is listing the power subsidiary, which he hopes will one day be the country's biggest private power operator.
Around water coolers in every office in India, the Reliance Power offering has been the topic of the day, with many punters selling some of their other stocks to raise money in the hope of getting as big an allocation as possible.
"It's a very good issue," says S Arun Natesh, a marketing executive in Mumbai. "If you look at Reliance's record, they have always delivered."
But the danger of this worshipful equity culture is that it is based on an element of patronage. The unwritten pact is that in return for the retail investors' blind trust, Reliance will deliver blockbuster returns.
This understanding has become so heavily ingrained that few brokers are willing to bet against the Reliance name, even if they think a stock issue is grossly overvalued.
Reliance Power, for instance, has no operating assets and has not secured all the necessary documentation for its vast pipeline of projects. Morgan Stanley has valued it at just $11bn - one third of its expected market capitalization following the IPO.
In a surprisingly frank note this week, Emkay, a Mumbai-based brokerage, could not have summed up better the dilemma for institutional investors looking at the stock.
"The issue appears to be highly overvalued considering the long gestation for the projects," said Emkay. "However, we believe that the stock could list at a premium on account of low liquidity and expected large oversubscription, and hence advise clients to subscribe to the issue purely to enjoy listing gains."
Reliance officials scoff at suggestions that investors would blindly buy its stock. They argue that institutional investors, in particular, cannot be seen to be making arbitrary investment decisions based on a company's name and reputation.
They also reject arguments that Reliance Power is especially risky because of its lack of a track record, pointing to the achievements of Mr Ambani in building out telecoms infrastructure and his success in India's mutual funds industry.
But there is no doubt that many of Reliance's retail investors do not care about such debates.
"For the small retail investor who's not really looking at corporate governance but is focusing on returns, as long as the offering meets government regulations, I think it's okay," says Mr Natesh.
