“They” and “them” are personal pronouns, usually considered gender-neutral.
The post, according to him, was deleted by LinkedIn twice after pointing it out as “unsafe”. He took to X to call out the incident while mentioning the need to build “own tech and AI in India”.
This was followed by his announcement to cut ties from the cloud services of Microsoft’s Azure and shift it to his firm’s own AI platform Krutrim. He also put an offer for other developers to move away from Azure.
“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! Mail us on exitazure@olakrutrim.com. Offer is perpetually open!” his post read on X.
Krutrim Si Designs is an artificial intelligence (AI) venture led by Aggarwal as ‘India’s own AI’ model. It was launched in April 2023 in Bengaluru along with Krishnamurthy Venugopala Tenneti who is a board member at ANI Technologies Limited, the parent company of Ola Cabs and Ola Electric. Its project team is based in India and the Bay Area (US).
Microsoft and Amazon dominate the cloud services market. According to the Synergy research group, Amazon’s AWS leads the cloud market share with 32 percent, followed by Microsoft’s Azure with 23 percent in 2024.
While pointing out Ola’s diversity, mentioning how it runs “one of the largest women-only automotive plants”, Aggarwal wrote that the only “community guidelines” should be the “Indian law”.
“No corporate person should be able to decide what will be banned. Data should be owned by the creators instead of being owned by the corporates who make money using our data and then lecture us on ‘community guidelines’!” his post on X added.
He also called the “pronouns issue” as “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.” He wrote.
Agreeing with the Ola CEO, one X user commented, “Salute to you Bhavish for voicing out an uncomfortable but ugly truth about woke foreign influence. We stand with you”. Another wrote, “A bigger proof of how the agenda of Wokeism is totally executed by US-based corporations.”
However, some X users also pointed out that the issue boiled down to “respect”. “Respecting someone’s gender identity and pronouns is not a ‘woke political ideology of entitlement’. It’s basic human decency,” said one user.
