Aggarwal recently found himself in conflict with LinkedIn. Earlier this week, Aggarwal spoke to X to express his thoughts on the concept of gender pronouns and hopes that the 'pronoun illness» will not become widespread in India.
He had asked the AI robot on LinkedIn about him. In the response, the bot used “they” and “their” to address the Ola founder (instead of “he” or “his”).
LinkedIn deleted his post calling him “dangerous”, as Aggarwal claimed in his X post. The platform also deleted his second post. Aggarwal shared the same on X, but this time the Ola CEO also tagged Microsoft.
Here is the full text of Aggarwal's post on X criticizing LinkedIn and Microsoft:
On @Linkedin, @Microsoft and their awakening.
As an Indian institution, Ola supports real actions in favor of diversity. We run one of the largest women-only automobile factories. Not 1 row out of 10, nor a small section, but the whole plant! Nearly 5,000 women today and tens of thousands in the years to come. And when it comes to gender inclusion, we don't need lessons from Western companies on how to be inclusive. Our culture didn't need pronouns to be inclusive for thousands of years. On a personal note, I had visited Ayodhya last year and learned how transgenders have been given special respect in our culture since ancient times! Here is a short video from our national broadcaster DD about it – https://youtube.com/watch?v=goDQFIAZtt8.
On the other hand, the pronoun issue I spoke about is a woke political ideology at all that has no place in India. I wouldn't have waded into this debate, but Linkedin clearly assumed that Indians needed to have pronouns in our lives and that we couldn't criticize them. They will force us to agree with them or eliminate us. And if they can do that to me, I'm sure the average user doesn't stand a chance. As a founder and CEO, this Western DEI system has had a major impact on my business because it has developed an entitlement mentality in our professional lives and I will fight it.
This situation brings me to the need for us to build our own Indian technology platforms. I am not against global technology companies. But as an Indian citizen, I fear that my life will be governed by Western big tech monopolies and that we will be culturally subsumed, as the experience above shows. This is not about Ola or any of my companies. Ola is too small to make an impact against this. I want to confront this forced ideology as a free-spirited Indian and do what I can within my capabilities. So here are the actions I am taking. Put my money where my mouth is.
⁃While we can't do anything about Linkedin's overnight monopoly, I am committed to working with the Indian developer community to build a DPI social media framework. IPRs like UPI, ONDC, Aadhaar, etc. are a uniquely Indian idea and are even more necessary in the world of social media. The only “community guidelines” should be Indian law. No legal entity should be able to decide what will be prohibited. Data should be owned by the creators instead of owned by companies that make money using our data and then lecture us on “community guidelines”!
⁃Since LinkedIn is owned by Microsoft and Ola is a big Azure customer, we have decided to move our entire workload from Azure to our own cloud @Krutrim over the next week. It's a challenge as every developer knows, but my team is so motivated to do it.
⁃To any other developers looking to leave Azure, we will offer a full year of free cloud usage. As long as you don't return to Azure after that! Email us at [email protected]. The offer is perpetually open!
