Biography | Sundar Pichai — The CBSE School on 4th Avenue That Issued His Class X Certificate

People treat Alphabet's chief executive as a Silicon Valley product.

He was a quiet Class X student on this Chennai avenue, and his teachers later struggled to put a face to the name.

Pichai Sundararajan was born on 10 June 1972.

Current reference works give the birth city as Madurai, in Tamil Nadu.

Older profiles, including some still in circulation, said Madras, now Chennai.

What is not in dispute is where he grew up: Ashok Nagar, in a two-room apartment his parents rented while he and his younger brother slept in the living room.

The family house is still a private address, so this pin stays on the school, not the street.

Jawahar Vidyalaya Senior Secondary School stands at 71, 4th Avenue.

It is a CBSE campus opened in 1966 under the Stree Seva Mandir society, named for Jawaharlal Nehru.

Pichai studied here from 1979 to 1987, Class I through Class X.

The principal who later hunted for his file, Alice Jeevan, told reporters in August 2015 that the school found his transfer certificate only after the Google announcement forced them to look.

R. M. Krishnan, principal in the year he sat the Class X exam, said he could not recall the boy's face.

Teachers described a calm student who was good at science and was not the school topper.

His father, Regunatha Pichai, was an electrical engineer at the British firm GEC and ran a factory that made electrical components.

His mother, Lakshmi, worked as a stenographer.

2015 profiles, drawing on Bloomberg Businessweek, reported that the household went years without a car and got its first telephone when Sundar was twelve.

After Class X he moved a few kilometres to Vana Vani, the school on the IIT Madras campus, for Classes XI and XII, and left Chennai after 1989.

The later degrees — metallurgy at IIT Kharagpur, materials science at Stanford, an MBA at Wharton — sit on top of this record.

The first public paper trail is a transfer certificate issued on this avenue.

Photo: Sundar Pichai in 2014, Maurizio Pesce, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

No rights-clear 1980s photograph of the school building was found on Commons as of 5 September 2026. The cover is the person, not the 1987 facade.