Biography | Sundar Pichai — The Hijli Building Where a Metallurgist Took an Institute Medal

People treat Google's chief executive as a computer-science product of Silicon Valley.

The degree that carried him to Stanford was in metallurgical engineering, taken on this campus in 1993.

Pichai Sundararajan was born on 10 June 1972.

Most later accounts give Madurai, Tamil Nadu, as the birthplace and Chennai as the city where he grew up.

Britannica instead lists Madras, now Chennai, as the birth city.

He finished Class X at Jawahar Vidyalaya Senior Secondary School, 71 Fourth Avenue, Ashok Nagar, then Class XII at Vana Vani on the IIT Madras campus.

In 1989 he entered the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur.

The building behind this pin is the former Hijli detention camp, reused when the first Indian Institute of Technology opened here on 18 August 1951.

He lived four years in Nehru Hall of Residence.

Later visits fixed the room as B-308 in the B wing.

The cricket ground sat behind that block, and the hostel library was the place he used after hours.

He studied in the Department of Metallurgical and Materials Engineering and finished the B.Tech. in 1993 as the department topper.

The institute recorded an Institute Silver Medal.

A professor in the department later named the same prize as the B. C. Roy Silver Medal.

On 7 August 2015, three days before Google announced him as chief executive, IIT Kharagpur gave him its Distinguished Alumnus Award in absentia at the 61st convocation.

He returned in person on 5 January 2017, walked the B-wing corridor, and spoke from the campus open-air theatre.

The pin is the public main building.

Nehru Hall remains a working student hostel; this memory does not publish a room.

Pichai is a living executive.

The facts here are the degree, the medal, and two dated returns to a campus that is open to visitors at the gate.

Photo: IIT Kharagpur Main Building by Ambuj Saxena, 3 March 2007, CC BY 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons.

Portrait: Sundar Pichai, 26 February 2014, Maurizio Pesce, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.