Even though people of Bharatiya origin occupy leading positions in big tech companies across the globe, we still haven’t developed homegrown technological platforms to compete with the likes of Google, Facebook, etc. We are still dependent on the Western AI ecosystem and unlike China, creating indigenous digital platforms has never been quite a priority area for Bharat.
Noted author Rajiv Malhotra raises this issue effectively in his seminal book Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Power: 5 Battlegrounds. He does a comparative analysis of the digital ecosystem of Bharat and China and argues that while both started around the same time, China is now a global leader in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) whereas we are not even marginal players. That is because the development of homegrown technologies has never been a policy focus area of the Bharatiya government and Bharatiya tech companies too hardly invest in R & D, the author argues.
The result is that our tech startups are hugely dependent on the Western AI ecosystem. With dependence comes submission. Since the Bharatiya startup ecosystem is dependent on the big tech ecosystem, they have to put up with its whims and fancies. We have earlier discussed the issue of wokeism in big tech, that is how technology giants like Microsoft and Google also control the flow of information in society and create an ecosystem for subtly influencing public perception and political choices by injecting a set of biases in their AI algorithms.
Since Bharatiya startups don’t have an alternative, they often have to put up with the woke whims and fancies of the big tech. But not anymore, it seems.
Bharatiya entrepreneurs are now challenging the wokeism of big tech and taking active measures to develop indigenous Bharatiya AI platforms.
Bhavish Aggarwal, co-founder and CEO of Ola, has come out strongly against what he calls the “pronoun illness” of big tech after LinkedIn’s AI chatbot addressed him as “they” instead of He.
Bhavish had asked the AI chatbot on LinkedIn about him. In its response, the chatbot used “they” and “their” to address the Ola CEO instead of “He” or “His”. Bhavish Aggarwal then reportedly wrote a post on the platform critiquing its weird obsession with pronouns and denouncing the wokeism of big tech. He came out strongly against the concept of gender pronouns and said he hoped this “pronoun illness” would not become a widespread issue in India. LinkedIn reportedly deleted his post, not once but twice. The Ola CEO then took to social media platform X to make his point.
Criticizing what he called the “wokeness” of LinkedIn and Microsoft, the Ola CEO wrote a long post on his X handle through which he also announced that Ola would move its entire workload out of Azure which is owned by Microsoft on its own Krutim cloud within a week.
He also announced through his X post that he is committing himself to working with the Bharatiya developer community to build a DPI social media framework. Digital public infrastructures like UPI, ONDC, Aadhar, etc. are a unique Bharatiya concept and should be used to create an inclusive social media framework from a Bharatiya perspective, he emphasized. Only if we develop our indigenous social media frameworks based on our own indices and parameters, we will be able to get rid of the wokeness and the unjust “community guidelines” imposed by big tech on Bharatiyas, Bhavish Agrawal argued in his X post.
“As an Indian institution, Ola is for genuine actions on diversity. We run one of the largest women only automative plants. Not 1 out of 10 lines, or a small section, but the whole plant! Almost 5,000 women now and will grow to tens of thousands in the coming years. And regarding gender exclusivity, we don’t need lectures 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 learnt about how transgenders had been accorded special respect in our culture from ancient times!
On the other end the pronouns 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 clearly LinkedIn has presumed Indians need to have pronouns in our life, and that we can’t criticize 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” (From Bhavish Agrawal’s X).
Bhavish Aggarwal has raised a valid point about the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) system that western companies are increasingly following. As pointed out by many experts, the imposition of arbitrary criteria in the hiring mechanism of businesses invariably leads to reverse discrimination and filtering out of individuals with non-woke ideologies.
The DEI is increasingly being used by the woke lobby as a tool to promote their political agendas and weed out those with ideologies different from theirs. Thus ironically, DEI destroys diversity rather than nurturing it. It also attacks the very basis of meritocracy; the idea that the best talent should be hired on a merit basis stands totally quashed by the application of DEI.
DEI demands that people be hired not based on their merit, but based on their political beliefs, the political causes they support, their knowledge of the new-fangled and ever-evolving world of politically correct woke terminology, etc. The woke lobby, argue experts, is essentially using DEI as a tool to impose a uniform thought process on people and thus further intellectual autocracy rather than diversity.
That’s precisely why Ola CEO Bhavish Aggarwal has raised a valid issue here. The LinkedIn chatbot referring to Bhavish as “they” and “theirs” instead of “he and “his” might not seem a big issue but its implications are serious. It points to a larger ecosystem wherein Bharatiya entrepreneurs are getting increasingly vulnerable to the whims and fancies of the woke lobby.
It’s no secret that the woke lobby uses cancel culture as a tool to silence and boycott anyone who doesn’t agree with their viewpoint. There is no scope for a healthy debate and discussion; you either meekly agree with them and pronounce yourself guilty or you disagree. As wokeness gets further consolidated through mechanisms like DEI, it will be used to blackmail Bharatiya companies and entrepreneurs into accepting unfair terms and conditions. In other words, the West uses wokeness both as a geopolitical and business tool.
That is why the point raised by Ola CEO Bhavish Agrawal is significant. Hopefully, other Bharatiya businesses will take a cue from the guts exhibited by this young entrepreneur who didn’t think twice before calling out big tech giants like Microsoft on their woke policies.
Most importantly, Bhavish Aggarwal has spoken about the need for Bharat to develop its own indigenous social media framework and has announced his own ambitious plans regarding the same. If Bharatiya tech companies can collaborate on such a project of an ambitious scale, Bharat can successfully move out of the web of dependence on Western social media platforms.
Dependency on external stakeholders comes at multiple costs. In the case of Bharat, the risks are huge. Sensitive data concerning millions of Bharatiyas is potentially stored on non-Bharatiya servers. Western companies and organizations use sophisticated mechanisms to mine the data of our citizens which can be used for all sorts of projects from influencing public opinion to election results. Data is a powerful geopolitical tool in the 21st century, Thus, it’s the need of the hour for Bharat to develop its homegrown digital ecosystem.
Following his X post regarding the wokeism of big tech, Ola CEO Bhavish Aggarwal was interviewed by Rajiv Malhotra. The whole interview can be accessed on his YouTube channel Infinity Foundation Official.
In the interview, Bhavish raises important points regarding the desired future growth trajectory of Bharat. He says that Bharat needs to move forward in the path of innovation and economic development while tapping into its civilizational and cultural heritage and the foundational values of our society.
He further emphasizes that it’s time for Bharat to build excellence and that we shouldn’t waste our time by getting embroiled in these entitlement philosophies.
Bharat needs a renaissance of sorts linking our cultural heritage to the aspirations for the future and technological development and economic development; culture and economic development should converge he agrees.
Homegrown entrepreneur Bhavish Aggarwal’s example will hopefully inspire Bharat’s other young tech entrepreneurs to take the lead in developing an indigenous digital ecosystem rather than depending on the Western paradigm. It should also send a message to the government that to become truly digital, we need to develop our own technological paradigms and systems and collaborate with the big tech on our own terms and conditions.
