'On @Linkedin, @Microsoft and their wokeness,' the Ola boss Bhavish Aggrawal captioned his X post .
Bhavish Aggarwal, the CEO of Ola, on Saturday sparked another conversation with his recent post on X (formerly Twitter), slamming the job seeking social media handle LinkedIn and the tech giant Microsoft for their woke policies.
Through the post, Aggarwal added that Ola has decided to move their entire workload out of Azure to their own Krutrim cloud within the next week.
"Since LinkedIn is owned by Microsoft and Ola is a big customer of Azure, we’ve decided to move our entire workload out of Azure to our own @Krutrim cloud within the next week. It is a challenge as all developers know, but my team is so charged up about doing this. Any other developer who wants to move out of Azure, we will offer a full year of free cloud usage. As long as you don’t go back to Azure after that," he wrote.
In his post, Aggarwal criticised what he sees as the imposition of Western ideologies on Indian users, particularly highlighting LinkedIn's introduction of pronouns in user profiles.He argued that such practices are out of place in India and challenged the notion that Western companies should dictate cultural norms in his country.
This recent post by Aggarwal comes after a series of posts in his social media platform, after LinkedIn removed Aggarwal's post discussing the use of gender pronouns, sparking criticism from the entrepreneur.
In the latest post, Aggarwal outlined Ola's commitment to diversity and inclusion while asserting the company's stance against what he referred to as "woke political ideology" regarding gender pronouns. Aggarwal highlighted Ola's women-only automotive plant, which employs nearly 5000 women and aims to expand in the coming years.
"On the other hand, the pronouns issue I wrote about is a woke political ideology of entitlement which doesn’t belong in India. I wouldn’t have waded into this debate but clearly LinkedIn has presumed Indians need to have pronouns in our life, and that we can’t criticise it. They will bully us into agreeing with them or cancel us out. And if they can do this to me, I’m sure the average user stands no chance. As a founder and CEO, this western DEI system has a major impact on my business as it grows an entitlement mindset in our professional lives and I will fight it," wrote Aggarwal to his X post.
Aggarwal in his post, rejecting the imposition of western values, highlighted India's historical inclusivity, pointing examples from Indian culture, including Ayodhya's treatment of transgender individuals.
He also criticised LinkedIn's presumption that Indians needed to adopt Western pronoun practices and condemned the platform's attempts to stifle criticism.
About the incident
Aggarwal in an earlier post shared on the LinkedIn platform criticised LinkedIn for using gender pronouns and asked the platform's AI to write about his bio, but the Ai platform referred to him as 'they' instead of 'he.'
He then posted a screenshot, calling it an "illness" from the West and saying India doesn't need it.
Thereafter, LinkedIn removed his post discussing the use of gender pronouns, which he referred to as 'pronoun illness' to which he shared another post in his social media account.
Expressing frustration at LinkedIn's repeated removals, Aggarwal later posted another tweet, in response to the platform's action, given its ownership by Microsoft.
