The Club Of Clueless CEOs

Islamophobia is rampant in our workplaces—one study found that Muslim women receive half as many callbacks as Hindu women do for their job applications. Casteism, clearly visible in our shiniest institutes of higher education, manifests in our workplaces in the glaring absence of marginalised castes. A couple of years ago, Google News cancelled a talk on caste bias by one of my favourite authors because its upper caste employees felt 'targeted'. 

And after the #MeToo movement gained momentum, the discussions at companies were far from being introspective or empathetic. Many senior executives across industries—probably the same folks who do efficiency mental math after asking a potential female employee her marital status—had a simpler idea to fight sexual harassment: hire fewer women.  

We know that corporate India rarely speaks up against injustices, but recent examples confirm that the conservative, 'traditional' or, as I call it, prejudiced/hateful thinking comes straight from the top.

Sam Pitroda, who modernised telecommunications, couldn't do the same for his own ability to communicate Indian diversity, using a racial analogy that angered many. CEO Harsh Goenka specialises in sharing misogynistic marriage jokes on his Twitter (now known as X) handle. Here’s one from 2022: @hvgoenka I told my wife "You are cute when you are mute." My wife replied "You are honey when you give me money!"

Even the CEOs of Zomato and Ola, the two companies that have previously spoken up against discrimination, are now card-carrying members of the club of clueless CEOs. 

Zomato's CEO Deepinder Goyal's announcement of a ‘pure vegetarian fleet’ of delivery persons dressed in green showed an appalling lack of understanding about the historic prejudices that swirl around purity, caste and food preference.

Ola CEO Bhavish Aggarwal recently felt free to say publicly that he hoped "pronoun illness", a western menace, doesn’t reach India. "…see many CVs with pronouns these days," he said. "Need to know where to draw the line in following the west blindly!"

In case they were lulled by Ola's enthusiastic annual Pride Month celebration or Aggarwal’s inclusion in Time magazine's Climate 100 list for "leading the path" to sustainable transport in this country, non-binary job seekers (Indians, not westerners) now know exactly where they stand with Ola's senior-most executive. Aggarwal's callous comment is a blow to India's LGBTQAI+ community, which still agonises about coming out to their largely straight and proudly married colleagues.

Many Indian CEOs, led by the granddaddy of successful bucket-bath-only entrepreneurs and Britain's best known Indian father-in-law NR Narayana Murthy, fail to comprehend ideas such as toxic workplaces or work-life balance. 

Murthy, we all know, believes that employees should work a minimum of 70 hours every week like the "less fortunate who work extremely hard". I guess he's never thought to examine why members of the latter group must work as hard as they do—and for so little pay.   

Britain’s four-day week experiments likely give such leaders the heebie-jeebies. Mental health is an alien concept for these CEOs—"young people are too fussy…in our days…" Except let's not be ageist, it's not just the septuagenarians who speak like this. 

Cred's 40-something CEO Kunal Shah has weighed in on Murthy's side too, offering the Chinese model of "9-9-6 culture—9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week".

The same year he made it to Fortune India's 40 Under 40 list, Shantanu Deshpande, CEO of Bombay Shaving Co., shared this gem on work-life bla-lance:

"When you are 22 and new in your job, throw yourself into it. Eat well and stay fit, but put in the 18 hour days for at least 4–5 years. I see a LOT of youngsters who watch random content all over and convince themselves that 'work life balance, spending time with family, rejuvenation bla bla' ’ is important…Don’t do random rona-dhona. Take it on the chin."

After he body-shamed cricketer Prithvi Shaw last year, entrepreneur Ankur Warikoo apologised. Though he's not a CEO, I'm sharing this story because the text of his apology revealed a basic truth: Just like the rest of us, the big boys have been brought up with that classic Indian parenting staple—shame. It's so ingrained we don’t even recognise when we use it on others.  

"In an attempt to invoke my mom’s natural reaction to my fitness levels in my 20s, I made a horrible mistake," Warikoo wrote. Who can forget former PepsiCo CEO Indira Nooyi's story about rushing home to share news of a promotion and being told by her mother to go to the store to get milk. When Nooyi later protested, her mother told her to leave her CEO crown in the garage.  

Is it naive to expect our leaders—whether they manage companies or the country—to strive to be better than the rest of us? Have we begun to expect less from them? Or, even more worrying, have we braced ourselves to accept the worst from them?  

It's hard to imagine Indian CEOs taking a stand and stepping down like many leaders in the US did during the Black Lives Matter protests, but a basic workplace sensitivity primer is a minimum non-negotiable starting point. I'm happy to write it for you, dear CEOs.

Priya Ramani is a Bengaluru-based journalist and is on the editorial board of Article-14.com.

The views expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of NDTV Profit or its editorial team.