Biography | PB Balaji — He Took a Mechanical Degree From This Campus in 1991

Pathamadai Balachandran Balaji is usually introduced as a finance chief.

The mechanical-engineering degree came first, and it came from this campus.

He finished a B.Tech. at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras with the class of 1991.

Two independent profiles — Business Standard's 2025 biographical sketch and Hindustan Unilever's 2014 shareholder notice — both record the same fact: mechanical engineering at IIT Madras, then a postgraduate diploma at IIM Calcutta.

The campus sits on Sardar Patel Road in Chennai, between Adyar and Velachery, on land carved from the Raj Bhavan estate when the institute was founded in 1959.

Gajendra Circle is the hinge of the place.

Two avenues through the faculty housing meet here, beside the administrative block.

Students still treat the circle as the wayfinding point between hostels named for rivers and classrooms deeper in the academic zone.

Balaji was one of the mechanical-engineering graduates who left that year for a two-year management course in Joka.

He did not stay in design offices or shop floors.

The next documented step is IIM Calcutta, then a Unilever management-trainee offer dated May 1993 in HUL's own board papers.

The sequence is the point.

A schoolboy from Ida Scudder School near Vellore used the IIT-JEE route into a mechanical department, then used the IIM route into consumer-goods finance.

The later titles — HUL CFO, Tata Motors group CFO, Jaguar Land Rover CEO — sit on that 1991 degree.

The buildings have been added to since he left.

The circle with the two painted elephants is still the landmark a visitor uses to find the old administrative core.

Photo: Gajendra Circle, IIT Madras, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons