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5 Stories Shared By Sundar Pichai From His IIT Days That Will Make Engineers Miss Their College
Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Alphabet and Google, was once a humble, nerdy engineering student at IIT Kharagpur who went by the name Pichai Sundararajan.
He studied metallurgical engineering in the most prestigious engineering college in India and made his name in the global tech industry.
But much before he took over the tech giant, he was a regular student who saw a computer for the first time in his college.
© Instagram/Sundar Pichai
It might be hard to believe but Pichai bunked classes, played cricket and had a bowl of maggi late at night just like any other engineering student. Here are some other interesting and rare facts and stories about Sundar Pichai from his IIT days that prove he was like any other engineering student. Disclaimer: these funny throwback stories might make you miss your college life terribly.
He thought ‘abey saley’ was a legit way to call people
Pichai’s mother tongue was Tamil and he struggled with Hindi when he started college at Kharagpur. He said that he had learned Hindi in school but never spoke much in his life. He started to learn and grasp some words by listening to how people are speaking in college. He admitted that because of this, he thought ‘abey saley’ was a friendly greeting and an acceptable way to address people.
He accidently shut down his college mess
Speaking of his struggle with the Hindi language and his misconceptions about calling out to people with abey saley, it actually ended up landing him in trouble. He revealed that he unintentionally offended the mess guy by yelling abey saley at him and as a result, they shut the mess. Pichai said. “The folks at the mess were quite upset and temporarily closed down the mess,”. “It didn’t make me very popular,” he added.
He met his wife in the college
Pichai found love in the narrow corridors and dingy classroom of his college. He met his wife Anjali Pichai in IIT where she was his classmate. He confessed his love in the final year of their engineering and had a long distance relationship as he moved to the USA for higher studies and Anjali was in India. At the time, Pichai had no money so they couldn’t for months. After they both got a job in the USA, they got married.
He was a shy student with ‘big handwriting’
His professor from IIT Indranil Manna remembers him as a “shy, quiet, but extremely intelligent” in class. Manna was a mentor for his B.Tech thesis and has kept a copy of his work after all these years. Also, he vividly remembers his “big handwriting”. As they say, people who think fast do not have the best handwriting. Seems like it’s true in Pichai’s case.
He was ragged by his seniors
Although the colleges are quite strict about ragging now and have policies in place against any kind of harassment, this was not the case about 25 years ago when Pichai was a student. He spoke about how his parents were scared about him getting ragged like any Indian parents when he left for college and revealed that he was in fact ragged by his seniors a little bit, but all in good spirits. He said “I am glad it’s much better now’.
All these stories are testimonies that he was like any other engineering undergraduate and that the student life is the same for everyone regardless of the course, college or the caliber of the student. Except for students attending online classes due to the pandemic, of course. Poor kids!