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    HomeNewsTrendsUnacademy uses author Manu Pillai's photo in ad. His response

    Unacademy uses author Manu Pillai's photo in ad. His response

    Manu Pillai shared another instance from a student testimonial featured on Dhurina that wrongly featured him as a student – Mohit Gaur.

    Moneycontrol News
    December 15, 2022 / 13:39 IST
    Manu Pillai features as "Sagar Chauhan" in the Unacademy ad. (Image: gauravmunjal/Twitter)

    Manu S Pillai, author and historian, today pointed that his photograph has been used by Unacademy in an advertisement on Twitter. In addition to this, Pillai also added that he had been featured as “Mohit Gaur who liked to make free pdfs" in the past.

    “Apparently I am "Sagar Chauhan", senior frontend engineer. Not the first time this is happening. Somewhat miffed that I have such a generic face, it gets lifted for all kinds of random advertisements,” Pillai wrote tagging a thread from Gaurav Munjal, Unacademy’s founder.


    In an e-mail to Moneycontrol, Unacademy said, "Manu’s picture pops up in the figma community plugin which is why there are several other instances of his image being used in other’s collaterals to which he has corroborated on his twitter as well."

    Munjal’s post was about launching “Next level” that featured Pillai in a small photograph as Sagar Chauhan.

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    “Credentialing is broken. We still rely on random Degrees and Certifications to measure how good someone is for a particular Skill. And LinkedIn feels like a Product from early 2000. It’s time to change all of this. NextLevel is launching next week,” Munjal’s tweet read.

    While Pillai said he was “somewhat miffed to have a generic face” due to which his photo gets picked for random ads.

    He went on to share another instance from a student testimonial featured on Dhurina that wrongly featured Pillai as a student – Mohit Gaur.


    When writer Preeti Shenoy asked about whether he has contacted anyone to fix this, Pillai said: “Aah yes in the earlier case I was able to get them to take it down. And they sent a half apology saying a "vendor" supplied the image or something like that.”

    He even mentioned in a separate comment that some agency must have added his image to their stock photos of "Average Indian Man" or something alike.

    Manu Pillai is the author of four books starting with 'The Ivory Throne' (2015). His latest is 'False Allies' (2021).

    Moneycontrol News
    first published: Dec 14, 2022 06:45 pm

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