Ola CEO Bhavish Aggarwal Criticizes Big Tech and ‘Wokeism’

New Delhi, India – Ola CEO Bhavish Aggarwal has spoken out against ‘wokeism’ and criticized big tech companies for setting their own rules. In an interview, Bhavish shared an incident from May when LinkedIn, owned by Microsoft, deleted his post about ‘pronoun illness’ after the platform referred to him as ‘they’.

Bhavish said, “They’ve become their own sovereigns. Their mindset is that we are setting the rules of the world. All these big tech companies, and I don’t mind saying the names, Microsoft, Google, any of these, Meta, you know, they are setting the rules of the world in their own mind.”

He explained that LinkedIn now refers to users as ‘they’ if they don’t set their pronouns, which he feels forces users to engage with a political philosophy. “I’m a man. I mean, I want to be referred to myself as a ‘he’, but I don’t want to set my pronouns because they’re forcing me to engage with this political philosophy of wokeism by making it sort of mandatory,” he said.

Bhavish also mentioned his visit to Ayodhya last year, where he learned about the transgender community and emphasized India’s culture of acceptance. He said, “When I had gone to Ayodhya last year on Diwali with my wife… We learnt about the transgender community there which is a very deep part of the Ramayana. And that’s our culture of truly accepting. It’s acceptance of any kind of diverse thought or physical difference or whatever.”

He concluded by stating that India needs to build its own technology based on its value systems. “We as an Indian ecosystem need to realize that these battles are actually not legal battles. These are technology battles. And we have to build our own technology built on the value systems of our own,” Bhavish said.