Zoho’s Sridhar Vembu Joins Ola CEO Bhavish Aggarwal’s Rant Against LinkedIn and Microsoft’s ‘Wokeness’
Zoho chief Sridhar Vembu said that he agrees with the opinion of Ola chief  Bhavish Aggarwal that India needs to resist the West’s woke imperialism. “I agree with Bhavish. We in India have to strongly resist this woke imperialism – it is best understood as a fanatical religious doctrine that masquerades as a socio-political movement,” replied Vembu to Aggarwal’s lengthy post on X where he expressed his concerns about the dominance of Western companies in the tech industry and their impact on Indian society. This comes after LinkedIn deleted Aggarwal’s post where he pointed out that the platform’s AI chatbot used wrong pronouns for him which Aggarwal referred to as ‘Pronoun Illness’ Aggarwal criticised the Western concept of “pronouns” and its imposition on Indian society. He expressed his concerns about the impact of Western social media platforms on Indian culture and the need for Indian tech companies to build their own platforms. “The pronouns issue is a woke political ideology of entitlement that doesn’t belong in India,” Aggarwal wrote. “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.” Aggarwal took a strong stance against the Western concept of gender inclusivity, which he believes is being imposed on Indian society. “We don’t need lectures from Western companies on how to be inclusive,” Aggarwal wrote, saying Indian culture didn’t need pronouns to be inclusive for thousands of years. Aggarwal also highlighted popular ride-hailing service’s efforts to promote diversity and inclusivity in the workplace. He noted that Ola has one of the largest women-only automotive plants in the country, with almost 5,000 women employees and plans to expand to tens of thousands in the coming years. He argued that Indian culture has always been inclusive and respectful of all genders, citing the example of transgenders being accorded special respect in ancient Indian society. Ola Plans to Stop Using Microsoft Azure Furthermore, Aggarwal, announced that Ola has decided to move its 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,” wrote Aggarwal. He further offered a full year of free cloud usage to any developer who wants to move out of Azure and wants to join Krutrim AI cloud. Besides Vembu, Unacademy chief Gaurav Munjal also supported Aggarwal’s stance. “This is so fucked up on LinkedIn’s part,” replied Munjal. “Indian civilization has a long history of inclusiveness regarding gender. However, the woke alphabet ideology promoting a pseudo-scientific view of gender is in conflict with both science and Indian ethos, “ wrote  BJP leader Tejasvi Surya. However, not all agreed. “Does he think people who deploy and run companies’ cloud or work in AI are as stupid as consumers who buy two wheelers?” wrote Kissan AI founder Pratik Desai. “Why does it sound like a pre-planned marketing campaign for launching Krutrim cloud? You can’t have these things done overnight for sure. Good way to grab attention, wrote  another user on X. lol so Ola cabs actually runs on AWS not on Azure. https://t.co/v8lnVClhtr— Arnav Gupta (@championswimmer) May 11, 2024
Aggarwal aims to build an Indian social media framework, alongside moving Ola’s workload out of Azure, and offers free cloud usage for developers leaving Azure.
Zoho chief Sridhar Vembu said that he agrees with the opinion of Ola chief  Bhavish Aggarwal that India needs to resist the West’s woke imperialism.
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Siddharth is a media graduate who loves to explore tech through journalism and putting forward ideas worth pondering about in the era of artificial intelligence.