NEW DELHI: He may have built the world’s biggest social network, but as a personality he looked anything but social. If anything, quite the opposite. Mark Zuckerberg, creator of Facebook, appeared every bit a shy, curly-haired geek when he, clad in a gray T-shirt and jeans, ambled up to the stage to talk to a restless, mostly star-struck audience assembled to hear the 30-year-old billionaire on his first ever business trip to India.A few slides into the presentation on his pet theme – Internet.org, an ambitious project aimed to bring internet access to the unconnected billions – the awkwardness ebbed.Over some 20 minutes or so Zuckerberg, a self-professed atheist, held forth with near religious zeal on his desire to bring the next five billion people on to the Internet. “Connectivity cannot be the privilege of the rich,” he told the 500 or so people assembled in Delhi’s Taj Palace hotel, many of them Facebook’s top customers in India, a bunch of internet entrepreneurs and assorted media.It also helps that this vision aligns with his business, whose future growth in large parts depends on getting more and more people embrace the Internet. India is a crucial piece in achieving his internet for all mission, launched last August and is a joint initiative of Facebook, Ericsson, MediaTek, Nokia, Opera, Qualcomm and Samsung.And Zuckerberg (or Zuck as he is called by friends), unsurprisingly perhaps, was lavish in his praise about the country which he has visited only once before in 2010 to attend a friend’s (Dropbox founder Aditya Agrawal) wedding and when he was photographed in a sherwani dancing barefeet. “Culturally this is the country that is very forward leading in science, engineering and research that make the benefits of connectivity here very profound for all,” said Zuckerberg, who is worth around $34 billion and the third richest American in the technology industry.In India, he said, the impact will be even more profound “because you have some of the best engineers in the world and a vibrant technology industry”. On Friday, he will meet Prime Minister Narendra Modi, an avid user of Facebook who exploited its networking and communicative abilities to the hilt during his successful election campaign and has also sought to make it an integral part of his administration. Modi’s verified Facebook page currently has nearly 2.3 crore “likes” or followers, and almost all major government departments and ministries have Facebook pages.The two are expected to discuss ways to collaborate on several ambitious government projects, notably the Clean India and Digital India campaigns that are especially dear to Modi.Facebook, with more than 100 million users in India, can become a platform to keep these projects alive, a government official told ET on Thursday. Zuckerberg is also scheduled to meet with IT and Telecom Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad on Friday. “I am mostly interested in learning and hearing what we can do to help.There are certain things that Facebook can uniquely bring… There are probably things that we can probably help out with uniquely, but I am also going to be listening to try and figure out what we can do on that,” Zuckerberg said, when asked about what he would discuss with the PM. The company’s phenomenal success has made him an inspiration and aspirational figure for legions of would-be entrepreneurs around the world, most so in India that is seeing a burst of entrepreneual activity.Worth around $34 billion, which makes him the third richest American in the technology industry, Zuckerberg is an iconic figure for many of them, with his Harvard dropout status and success when he was barely out of his teens. He has been the subject of a movie (The Social Network) and his 2012 marriage to long-time girlfriend Priscilla Chan, which included a performance by Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong only helping underline his pin-up credentials. For someone, whose life almost resembles like a movie script, Zuckerberg’s first official visit to India bore a distinctly scripted feel, quite unlike the sharing and open book qualities his company seeks to evoke.Appearing restless and at times even giving cold, robotic looks, Zuckerberg looked most human and comfortable while sweating under the spotlight during his keynote address. At other times he looked like somebody who could still shut himself in a dormitory writing code — a quintessential geek. All in all, a big contrast with the recent overseas visitors to India from the world of technology, notably Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Microsoft’s Satya Nadella and Google’s “next big man” Sundar Pichai. After the 20 minute-long keynote, Zuckerberg walked away nervously, only to reappear in another room a few meters away where a bunch of journalists were waiting for their chance to ask questions. His minders had asked for questions in advance and reporters were permitted to ask less than a dozen questions in all within the allocated 25 minutes.Asked if he were to do a startup again, and in India this time, what would it look like, he described several opportunities that still lie untapped by Facebook and Google, picking the worlds of mobiles and video as the next frontiers. Another Facebook-like phenomenon here? And, can it this time be Made in India? Now that would make his date for today – Narendra Modi – very happy.