CHENNAI: Quiet, unassuming and inarguably brilliant, tech giant Google’s new CEO is everything a company that has made a business out of revolutionising technology can ask for. And what’s more, he’s a Chennai boy to boot.
Sundar Pichai, or P Sundararajan as he was known during his school days in the city, has emerged at the helm of the most famous tech firm in the world, albeit of its mildly slimmed down version. The new and sleeker Google, wrote co-founder Larry Page in his detailed blog post, will be helmed by the man the company has already come to look to for its everyday operations. From the moment Sundar Pichai became the SVP of products and engineering in October 2014, he has had oversight of the day-to-day operations of all of Google’s major products, including advertising, search and maps.
But before Pichai became the go-to man in one of the largest tech firms in the world, he was a typical Chennai boy in one of the thousands of the city’s schools. Born to an electrical engineer father and a stenographer mother, Pichai studied in two of the city’s schools — Jawahar Vidyalaya in Ashok Nagar until Class X and moving to Vanavani Matriculation for his last two years of school.
Schoolmates recall a quiet, reserved and studious boy. “The one time I met him after school, he was studying at Wharton. We brainstormed for a while, and he came across as knowledgeable. But he kept his thoughts to himself. I never knew he was from Stanford and IIT,” said Pattu Subramanian, two years his senior at school. School records show high marks throughout his schooling, point out teachers at Vanavani. Pichai was no different at Jawahar Vidyalaya. A S Kumar, founder of the school alumni group J V Beyond Batch, narrated several accounts of schoolmates. “If one word describes him, it is studious. His classmates say he was always found with a book in hand. The only reason he didn’t get a first rank was because he wouldn’t concentrate much on subjects other than science,” revealed Kumar.
Quintessentially a Chennaiite, Pichai also has a soft spot for curd rice (thayir saadham), said a Google employee.