Ola boss Bhavish Aggarwal encourages Indian youth to wear kurta to office

Ola Managing Director & Chairman Bhavish Aggarwal wants to do away with formal wear. In a podcast, hosted by news agency ANI, the entrepreneur said he would like to normalise the wearing of ethnic wear like kurta at the office and do away with mandatory formal dress.

In Defence Of The Humble Kurta

Aggarwal valiantly defended the traditional men’s wear and said that they were elegant and thus were suited perfectly to formal environments. “We can be more comfortable in our skin in a [kurta], quite literally, right? And our skin is our clothing kind of fashion sense that is too from India. And kurta is a very elegant dress in my view. So, I feel all Indians, especially the younger tech ones, unko kurte me aana chahiye (should come dressed in kurta),” he told ANI journalist Smita Prakash.


Aggarwal explained that a lot of startup owners and employees blindly try to copy their Silicon Valley counterparts and often don black leather jackets and dark-coloured button-ups instead of looking to their roots for fashion. “Same leather jacket, black jeans, black shirt, and black leather jacket. So, a lot of you, in India, in our startup ecosystem, we end up looking up too much to the West. And so, sometimes people try to do the same thing. So, I said, let’s try our Indian sartorial things. So, we used to wear a kurta, and a kurta is so cool. It’s a good cloth for summer. And I think it looks cool too.”