Sundar Pichai Birthday: Here's A look At The Journey Of A 'C-Grader' From IIT To The Silicon Valley

The Google and Alphabet CEO, whose full name is Pichai Sundararajan got regular access to a computer after he went to America for postgraduate school.

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New Delhi: Sundar Pichai, The Google CEO, turns 48 today. The man who made India proud has come a long way from being a quiet and soft-spoken Chennai boy to someone who is leading one of the largest and perhaps the most well-known company in the world. Becoming the CEO for both Google and Apple lead him into history books but this success wasn't as easy as it looks.

The Humble Beginnings

Sundar Pichai was born in Chennai, India, in 1972. His father worked as an electrical engineer for the UK-based General Electric Company and his mother was a stenographer. Pichai grew up without a television or family car. Pichai once shared an interesting fact about his modest childhood during an interview with the New York Times, "There was a simplicity to my life, which was very nice compared with today's world. We lived in a kind of modest house, shared with tenants. We would sleep on the living room floor. There was a drought when I was growing up, and we had anxiety. Even now, I can never sleep without a bottle of water beside my bed. Other houses had refrigerators, and then we finally got one. It was a big deal." Pichai excelled in academics when he was in school. He even captained the school cricket team but it doesn't mean he never saw a failure during his early years. Addressing the students of IIT Kharagpur where he graduated, he said," that once he C grade in one paper but he got over that soon enough. "I think I did get C sometimes (when I was at IIT)... My first year CGP was so bad I had to work hard to make up for it for the next three years," he had told young students. In IIT, Pichai also met the woman he would marry later. "I met my wife Anjali at IIT Kharagpur, so whenever I asked a friend to call her, they would shout loudly Anjali, Sundar is here for you," he had said in 2017. After graduating, Pichai won a scholarship to study at Stanford University. The plane ticket from Chennai cost more than his father’s annual salary.

The Rise of Sundar Pichai

Pichai joined Google in 2004 and there his rise has been meteoric, largely because of his phenomenal success with the Chrome project. Pichai, and his team, was instrumental in creating Google Chrome and then making it the world's most used web browser.  After success with Chrome, Pichai gradually started appearing at Google's media and developer events. In 2013, he was given charge of running the Android division and in 2015, he was made the CEO of Google, when the company was restructured and Alphabet was created. Now, he is CEO of both Alphabet and Google.

Sunder Pichai: Students' Role Model

The Google CEO recently wrote an inspiring speech for the graduating class of 2020 and asked them to stay strong amid the pandemic. He said,"Be open, be impatient, be hopeful. If you can do that, history will remember the Class of 2020 not for what you lost, but for what you changed." Pichai shared incidents of his childhood and said, "I grew up without much access to technology, we didn't get our first telephone till I was ten, I didn't have regular access to a computer till I came to America for graduate school, on the television, when we finally got one, only had one channel. By contrast, you grew up with computers of all shapes and sizes." Pichai asked the students not to lose patience and said that it is time to be hopeful and positive. Also Watch|Mumbai: Corona growth rate reduced by 50% in hotspot areas