New Delhi, Jan. 6 -- What do ride-sharing, food delivery, electric scooters, and home inverters have in common? To the casual observer, very little. To Bhavish Aggarwal, the restless founder of the Ola group, they are interconnected nodes in a grand, unified theory of Indian tech. Since launching Ola Cabs in 2010, Aggarwal has spun off disparate businesses at dizzying speed, finding synergies that escape most ordinary folks. In his vision, a taxi business naturally leads to electric vehicles, seasoned with food delivery, fuelled by digital payments, and eventually anchored by foundational AI models for Indian languages.

It is the ambition of a polymath. But as Ola's recent trajectory suggests, there is a thin line between visionary diver...