Zoho’s Sridhar Vembu takes on Arattai name controversy; explains the world how to say it in many Indian languages

Arattai

Zoho’s new messaging app Arattai — which saw downloads jump from about 3,000 to over 3,50,000 in three days after its September 2025 push, briefly overtaking WhatsApp in some store categories — is back in debate. This time not for traction or features such as end-to-end encryption, group calling and multi-language UI support, but for its Tamil name.

A post by Zoho founder Sridhar Vembu on X attempted to flip the narrative. He published a comic-panel style graphic showing the equivalent of “banter” across Indian scripts, with the centre reading அரட்டை (Arattai) and the surrounding text including words in scripts ranging from Perso-Arabic to Odia, Bengali, Gujarati, Malayalam, Telugu and Devanagari.

Arattai — promoted as a domestic alternative to WhatsApp and endorsed by Union Minister Piyush Goyal — triggered comments on Reddit and X that the Tamil title is hard to pronounce for North Indian users and should be renamed for mass adoption. Entrepreneur Vivek Wadhwa, who tested the app early, also publicly advised a rename for global recall.

The backlash met counter-pushback. Users argued that Indians routinely pronounce Xiaomi and Huawei, and that a private company can name its product without Hindi-alignment expectations — mirroring past reactions in Tamil Nadu against Hindi-first naming by institutions.

Vembu’s new post arrives after his earlier February 2025 remark urging Tamil engineers to learn Hindi for work mobility — a comment that drew DMK criticism and revived old arguments around Tamil Nadu’s resistance to the three-language formula and the state’s decades-long politics of linguistic assertion.

By publishing the graphic now, Vembu has recast the naming fight into a teaching moment — signalling that the word “Arattai” may stay, and it is the rest of India that may have to learn how to say it.