In a world where social media has given one the boon to say anything and everything they want, there are some who have been using the platforms to spread negativity. Trolling, fat-shaming, slut-shaming and whatnot go on social media and it is really surprising how far can one go to make another person feel bad about themselves. Adding to the same, recently, Zerodha CEO and founder Nithin Kamath took to Twitter to announce a new way to ‘encourage’ his employees to stay fit on account of World Health Day. He has enticed his employees in the name of half a month’s bonus if they have a body mass index of less than 25. And needless to say, this is as toxic and twisted as possible.
Zerodha CEO Nithin Kamath’s Twisted Way Of Encouraging Fitness Among Employees
In his tweet, Kamath said that anyone on his team who has a body mass index less than 25 will get getting half a month’s salary as a bonus. In his following tweets, he also said that ‘the lowest average BMI or the largest change in average BMI wins’. To those who want to begin this fitness, he suggested they can start with walking 10,000 steps daily. Check his tweets below.
He also wrote a series of tweets later wherein he said that his team has ‘experimented’ with a couple of ideas to help the team prioritise their health amid the pandemic and the new work-from-home regime. He also added that this kind of initiative was conducted by the team last year as well and the one who met their goals was chosen through a lottery system that won them Rs 10 Lacs.
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Quite obviously, this did not sit well with netizens who have lashed out at Nithin Kamath for putting out these tweets. He has received serious backlash for his tweets. One Twitter user wrote that this ‘ableist practice is discriminatory and disgusting’ while another wrote ‘It’s discrimination, it’s ablist, it’s racist, it’s bullying & it’s horrifically fat phobic.’
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What Nithin Kamath has tweeted is actually wrong on so many levels. If he actually did care about his employees’ health, he could have managed to motivate them differently. He did not have to entice them with a salary bonus to get to lose weight. What’s more, centering ‘health concerns’ around weight alone is an extremely problematic notion. The corporate world is plagued with several other health concerns, primarily stemming from the stressful lives that employees lead. Perhaps something on that front would’ve been more thoughtful than telling people with existing health issues that they don’t deserve to be paid bonuses.