Google’s new CEO, the Chennai-bred Sundar Pichai, was a quiet, reserved and extremely academic boy in school, recall his classmates from Jawahar Vidyalaya, a CBSE school in the Ashok Nagar area of Chennai. Pichai studied there till the 10th standard, before moving to a Tamil Nadu state board school, Vana Vani, located in the IIT Madras Campus. He later went on to IIT Kharagpur.
Recalls a classmate: “Sundar was academically bright, though he wasn’t the first in class. He was always ranked third behind two girls, who took the first two ranks. He wasn’t very participative and kept to himself.”
Another classmate recalls that he always had a smile on and never got upset over anything and looked relaxed. The school put all the brightest students and achievers in the 9th standard in section A, where Pichai too was placed. Though, of course, there was nothing to indicate that one day he would go on to head a major global corporation.
“But, he’s still the same quiet person he always was; it’s difficult for us to imagine that he now heads Google,” recalls this classmate, who is still in close touch with him from their school-days.