Rebel WITHOUT A PAUSE

Inside the mind of India's most disruptive entrepreneur-who refuses to be restricted by risk, definition or legacy

- Ayaan Kartik, Sammya Mukhopadhyay and Mahima Sinha

Cocky. Confident. Brash. Brilliant. Bhavish Aggarwal is all of these. And he is more. At first glance he is a man on the cusp of midlife. His pitch-black hair seems to have been brushed back aggressively, revealing a growing forehead untouched by frown lines. He loves dogs. They are the only beings with unbridled access to him, in his office, in meetings or at home.

When you speak to him, he looks straight into your eyes. In his voice there is assertion. In his demeanour a worrisome paucity of doubt. Until recently he could be spotted wearing a T-shirt or even a suit. But not anymore. The 39-year-old has recently taken to the kurta and is at ease in it. It helps that it makes a statement.

But making a statement is not where Aggarwal is willing to stop. Not even at making a mark. Born to doctor parents, brought up in business-friendly Ludhiana and educated at the premier Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay, Aggarwal belongs to that sliver of the Indian middle class that has seen lives and lifestyles improve drastically since the liberalisation years. Thus, fresh out of IIT, when he secured a research role at Microsoft, it wasn’t enough for him. He quit within two years and started building Ola with his IIT-batchmate Ankit Bhati.

App-based cab hailing was new to India in 2012. Uber had been conceived only a few years prior in the US and had no plans of coming to India at the time. Ride hailing was not seen as the big business it has become in a country with patchy internet and limited access to smartphones. Yet in four years, Ola Cabs became a unicorn. In an interview with Bloomberg TV in 2015, the then 29-year-old Aggarwal said, “Our [Ola Cabs’] vision is that people won’t [need to] own cars.”