About 100 delegates — from academia, industry and the financial and entrepreneurial worlds — participated in the event, which concluded Wednesday evening with a lively roundtable discussion that included Mr. Gore and Mr. Hart, as well as Ratan N. Tata, the chairman of the Indian carmaker Tata Group and the manufacturer of the new, low-priced Nano automobile, and H. Fisk Johnson, the chairman and chief executive of the household product giant, S.C. Johnson & Son.

Mr. Johnson, whose company was praised by Mr. Gore as “one of the most sustainable in the world,” chatted about S.C. Johnson’s development of natural insecticides in Rwanda and the company’s use of biofuels to power factories in Vietnam and Indonesia.

“Disruptive,” Mr. Hart said, invoking the buzzword of the evening.

Mr. Tata pointed to the mobile phone’s ubiquity in the developing world as an example of a disruptive, leapfrog technology (albeit not exactly a green one) that has proliferated in poorer nations, providing communications to millions of people in places where landline infrastructure remains sparse or nonexistent.

“When I was a kid, you waited seven years for a telephone connection,” he said.

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Others saw it as the only sensible foreign investment made by NTT, a high-cost operator that was completely unaccustomed to the challenger role, but was the quintessential incumbent. Their culture meshed perfectly with the monopoly culture at SLT. In contrast to the losses incurred in Thailand and Indonesia, they did well in Sri Lanka, in the process turning SLT into some kind of modern organization, even if they could not make it efficient.

Now the Economist talks of the return of the Japanese. No stepping stone, now. Directly to India.

HERE we go again. When NTT DoCoMo, Japan’s dominant mobile operator, last ventured abroad, the results were painful. Between 1999 and 2001 it spent almost ¥2.2 trillion (about $20 billion) buying minority stakes in a handful of mobile operators around the world. But it ended up booking a loss of half the value of these investments in 2002 and scuttled home. In the past couple of years, however, DoCoMo has been buying stakes in foreign operators once again, with investments in South Korea, the Philippines, Malaysia and Bangladesh. Its latest move: India.

On November 12th DoCoMo said it would pay $2.7 billion for a 26% stake in Tata Teleservices, the mobile-telecoms arm of the Tata Group, one of India’s biggest conglomerates. The price, valuing the privately held Indian business at $10.4 billion, is steep: the operator is India’s sixth-largest, with barely 30m customers in a crowded market that boasts more than 300m. The company is believed to be unprofitable and is about to begin a costly network upgrade.

Pity the Economist missed the Sri Lanka experience of NTT.