Pronouns illness, Wokeness! Why Ola's CEO Bhavish Aggarwal Is Ending Ties With Microsoft's Azure?

What is your pronouns? Is a common notion and widely practised in western countries. It's imperfect but popular. Talk about universities, work environments and any sort of application or documents, days are gone when you only had to identify yourself between 'He' or 'She'. It's a wide spectrum - identifying, these days. Does India need it? Ola co-founder Bhavish Aggarwal thinks otherwise as he decided to cut ties with Microsoft by switching his company's services from Azure to a new cloud, Krutrim.

Why Bhavish Aggarwal whose India-based OLA decided to certainly end ties with Microsoft? The reason is the Western big tech monopolies that have started to ask pronouns, practically putting in place a woke culture in India.

Bhavish believes India does not need reminders from Western techies about gender inclusivity because he believes ancient old India's culture didn't need inclusivity over a thousand years. His remarks and decisions come after LinkedIn deleted one of his posts related to neutral pronouns used by LinkedIn AI.

The wokeness from LinkedIn and Microsoft has compelled Ola's CEO to launch their home ground cloud platform aka Krutrim.

In a long blog post, Aggarwal said, the pronoun 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 Linkedin has presumed Indians need to have pronouns in our life, and that we can't criticise it."

He added, "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 if it grows an entitlement mindset in our professional lives and I will fight it."

The Ola CEO added, "This situation brings me to the need for us to build our Indian tech platforms. I'm not against global tech companies. But as an Indian citizen, I feel concerned that my life will be governed by western Big Tech monopolies and we will be culturally subsumed as the above experience shows."

"This is not about Ola or any of my companies. Ola is too small to make any impact against this. I want to confront this forced ideology as a free-thinking Indian and do what I can in my capacity. So here are the actions I'm taking. Putting my money where my mouth is," he added.

While there can't be anything done about LinkedIn's monopoly overnight, Aggarwal said, "I'm committing to working with the Indian developer community to build a DPI social media framework."

According to him, DPIs like UPI, ONDC, Aadhaar etc are a uniquely Indian idea and are even more needed in the world of social media. 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"!

Thereby, he added, "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 कृत्रिम 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 worth of free cloud usage. As long as you don't go back to Azure after that! ," Aggarwal concluded.

It needs to be noted that Aggarwal isn't against gender inclusivity, he rather emphasises that India does not need lectures from Western companies on how to be inclusive.

As an Indian institution, Aggarwal said, "Ola is for genuine actions on diversity. We run one of the largest WOMEN ONLY automotive plants. Not 1 out of 10 lines, or a small section, but the whole plant! Almost 5000 women now and will grow to tens of thousands in the coming years."

On a personal note, he also added about his visit to Ayodhya last year where he learnt how transgenders had been accorded special respect in Indian culture from ancient times!

He added, "Our culture didn't need pronouns to be inclusive for thousands of years."

In November 2017, Microsoft and Ola joined hands in building a new connected vehicle platform for car manufacturers worldwide. As part of this strategic partnership, Ola that time announced that Microsoft would be a preferred cloud provider and would use Microsoft Azure to power Ola Play, the company's existing connected car platform.

Coming to Krutrim, launched by Ola it is an Indian-based AI which offers high-performance GPUs, real-time analytics and monitoring, scalable resources, advanced security, and a user-friendly interface.

Krutim Cloud is Dedicated to Revolutionizing the way professionals and organizations access high-performance computing. The AI platform delivers state-of-the-art GPU resources via the cloud, making advanced computing power accessible to everyone from individuals to large enterprises.

Lastly, Ola's move for ending ties with Microsoft's Azure, and launching their own cloud is widely applauded by Indians. Netizens took to Twitter now known as X to support his decision and the new platform.