Team Blitz India
Aphotograph of Sundar Pichai, who is currently in charge of Google’s parent company Alphabet, is in the news for a different reason. It’s an old photograph going viral that shows him holding his degree for the camera during the convocation at his alma mater, the Indian Institute of Technology in Kharagpur.
Pichai’s daughter Ananya Lohani posted the picture with her comments recently on the social media X (formerly Twitter), where she wrote: “My dad just shared this picture of his IIT KGP convocation (1993) with him, Sundar Pichai and Sharmistha Dubey in the same frame.
This is absolutely insane…” Pichai’s story is a page off the socalled “American Dream”. His life story almost sounds like a fairy, but one with grit and determination. He had a very humble beginning, born and schooled in Chennai where he is said to have slept on the floor of the sitting room along with his brother. Pichai later studied Metallurgical Engineering at IIT Kharagpur. The Times of India had quoted one of his tutors as stating that the Alphabet CEO was the “brightest of his batch”.
Alphabet, according to its website, is a collection of companies, the largest of which is Google. Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded Google in September 1998 and the company is headquartered in Mountain View, Calif. Billions of people use its wide range of popular products and platforms each day, like Search, Ads, Chrome, Cloud, YouTube and Android.
Pichai’s daughter, according to her X handle, is herself a software designer. As she wrote, the photograph also features the Indian-born American Sharmistha Dubey, who was the CEO of Match Group (2020-2022).
Dubey is said to have been the only woman in Pichai’s batch of Metallurgical Engineering.
