Biography | Sundar Pichai — Madurai Before the Two-Room Flat in Ashok Nagar

People treat Sundar Pichai as a Mountain View executive who arrived already named after Chrome and Alphabet.

The first city on the register was this one.

Pichai Sundararajan was born on 10 June 1972 in Madurai, Tamil Nadu, to Lakshmi, a stenographer, and Regunatha Pichai, an electrical engineer at the British firm GEC. The family did not stay. He was raised in a two-room apartment in Ashok Nagar, Chennai, shared with tenants, sleeping on the living-room floor with his brother. There was no car and, for years, no telephone. A drought in those years left him, he later said, unable to sleep without a bottle of water beside the bed.

The pin is set to Madurai because that is the birth recorded on the page. The rooms that trained the memory for telephone numbers were in Chennai: Jawahar Vidyalaya in Ashok Nagar, then Class XII at Vana Vani on the IIT Madras campus.

From those classrooms he sat the IIT-JEE and left for Kharagpur. The ticket to Stanford later cost more than his father's annual salary. The first city was still this temple town on the Vaigai.