Among Mr. Aiyar's ''fanciful dreams,'' as he calls them, is yet another pipeline that would dispatch gas from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan, then into Pakistan and India.

''We now realize we have to get a large part of our energy from our extended neighborhood, and that means we have to engineer and structure new relationships,'' said R.K. Pachauri, director general of Tata Energy Research Institute in Delhi. The nonprofit institute estimates that India will need to invest $766 billion in the energy sector to meet the growing demand over the next 25 years.

India's changing relationships regarding energy are inspiring a delicate diplomatic dance with the United States. Publicly, Bush administration officials, including Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on her visit here in March, have frowned on India's plans with Iran. India is pursuing nuclear technology as the United States and European nations are trying to get Iran to give up its own nuclear program.

This week, a senior Indian official, Montek Singh Ahluwalia, was in Washington to meet with the secretary of energy, Samuel W. Bodman, to discuss, among other things, nuclear energy options. Whether the United States will turn a blind eye to the Iran pipeline or consider selling nuclear reactors to India remains uncertain.

''In some sense there's a delicate tightrope walk that's going on,'' said Ashley J. Tellis of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. ''The Indians are trying to push the limits on what they can get away with, and the U.S. is trying to see how flexible India might be.''

Mr. Aiyar did not miss an opportunity to remind the United States obliquely that India would not countenance interference in one of its foreign policy priorities -- buying gas from Iran. ''We are sensitive to the concerns and interests of other nations,'' he said, ''even as we expect other nations to be sensitive to our concerns and our requirements.''

When it comes to molding and marketing India's energy needs, Mr. Aiyar -- a leftist at heart, a diplomat by training and possibly the biggest extrovert in India's Congress Party-led government -- likes to think grandly. He never tires of articulating a chief goal: to persuade China to cooperate rather than compete for oil and gas abroad. Some analysts greet the idea with skepticism.

Sundeep Waslekar, an analyst with Strategic Foresight Group in Mumbai, notes that China can offer a much more comprehensive and lucrative package -- including arms sales -- to energy-supplying countries like Iran, Sudan, or the former Soviet republics of Central Asia. Unless India can offer something strategic to China -- food, for instance -- China would have little reason to join efforts.

China-India energy cooperation in the oil and gas sector is ''a beautiful academic idea,'' Mr. Waslekar said. ''I don't see how it could work politically.''

Mr. Aiyar is unbowed. He offers the idea of an Asian gas grid that would stretch from former Soviet republics like Kazakhstan to the Persian Gulf all the way to China.

Every chance he gets, he pushes the analogy of the European coal and gas community, the precursor to the European Union. He demands to know why China and India cannot create the Eastern equivalent. ''An Asian oil and gas community, which could eventually blossom as an Asian identity in the politics of the world,'' he said.

Of course, for now, a majority of Indians continue to live in the dark -- that is to say, without electricity -- and the most common fuels for Indian households remain among the worst for respiratory health: charcoal and animal dung.

Correction: June 7, 2005, Tuesday Because of an editing error, an article on Sunday about how India's need for energy is changing its relationships with other countries misidentified a group that was a precursor to the European Union. It is the European Coal and Steel Community, not the European coal and gas community. The article also misstated the rate at which India uses oil. The rate in 2002 was 538 million tons per year, not per day.

Correction: June 8, 2005, Wednesday An article on Sunday about India's growing need for energy misstated the country's rate of consumption. It is the equivalent of 538 million tons of oil per year, not per day. A correction in this space yesterday included an erroneous reference to the rate. It represents the use of energy from all sources, including wood and charcoal, not just oil.