The Right Code, The Left In Shock Mode

 

I never thought I’d live to see the day when an Indian stopped forwarding dirty WhatsApp jokes and decided to build his own bloody WhatsApp. But here we are — and the man responsible is a thin, bespectacled Tamil named Sridhar Vembu.

For decades, we Indians have been the world’s IT coolies. We wrote code for the Americans, smiled for the Japanese, and called ourselves geniuses for fixing the Y2K bug. But when it came to making something *our own*, we behaved like a bunch of frightened bureaucrats waiting for permission from Uncle Sam.

And then this fellow Vembu quietly packed up his Silicon Valley dreams and returned to his village in Tenkasi. Not to retire — no. He went there to start a revolution with a laptop and a coconut tree. While the rest of our IT firms were polishing PowerPoints for Western clients, this man was training village kids to write software.

The result? *Arattai.* A Tamil word meaning gossip — and an Indian chat app that’s suddenly giving the goras a run for their money. Seven and a half million downloads in a single day! I don’t think even Gandhi’s autobiography sold that much.

Naturally, the first people to get upset were not Americans or Chinese, but Indians. Especially the ones who think patriotism is a fascist conspiracy. “Oh, he attended an RSS event once!” they cry, as if the poor man coded his app in saffron ink.

It’s the same old Indian disease — we hate our own success unless it comes wrapped in an American accent.

And then came the Congress and Left-wing friends, doing what they do best: moral philosophy on television. One called it “corporate Hindutva,” another muttered about “private monopoly.” Nobody, of course, downloaded the app before criticising it.

Our intellectuals can’t write code, but they can certainly write angry op-eds about the dangers of capitalism — from their American-made iPhones.

Meanwhile, Vembu refuses to go public, refuses to show off, and refuses to join the circus of valuations and venture capital. He says he’s content.

Content! In this age of greed and glory — imagine that.

The man lives like a hermit, thinks like a monk, and works like a madman. And he’s built a company, Zoho, that actually builds things — not presentations, not excuses. I’d call him a capitalist saint if that weren’t such a delicious contradiction.

Our so-called tech giants — Infosys, TCS, Wipro — should be taking notes. They’ve spent decades selling cheap Indian labour to foreign masters. Vembu, sitting in a dusty village, has sold ideas instead.

If there’s one thing this man has proved, it’s that Indian brains don’t need Western babysitters.

So, my advice to the critics: pour yourself a drink, calm down, and download Arattai.

And to Sridhar Vembu — may your servers never crash, may your app always gossip, and may your village keep producing geniuses.

Jai Hind — and pass me that Scotch.