"American by citizenship, Indian by heart" - Know how the COVID-19 situation in India and world made Google CEO Sundar Pichai cry

When someone is the greatest and the most powerful CEO of the largest tech company of the world, we assume that his life is flawless, ultimate, and without any blues. But that is certainly not the case. When Amol Ranjan from BBC interviewed Sundar Pichai, the exceptional CEO of Google and Alphabet at Silicon Valley in California, he was asked amongst a range of other questions - when did he last cry? The answer, we would all agree, is not a personal one. 

As the COVID-19 began to shatter homes and take away the lives of those we loved, especially in India, it affected every single individual. Pichai’s answer evoked similar emotions in each one of us. He said that he couldn’t hold himself back when he saw morgue trucks parked all around the world during COVID-19, and especially in India where the second wave of pandemic hit hard and was more brutal. India recorded heart-wrenching death rates in the months of April-May and photos of dead bodies washing up in Ganges and being burnt around the clock flooded the Internet.

An Indian by heart

Pichai said that although he is an American citizen, India is a big part of who he is right now. When asked about his roots, the Google CEO was clear in his message- that Indianness is within him. Born in Tamil Nadu and grown up in Chennai, he revealed that he came from a very middle-class family. In the same breath, he mentioned that technology always piqued his interests- be it the old rotary phone that they were on a waiting list for, to the scooter the entire family piled on to for a monthly dinner. 

Technology opened a plethora of options for him, giving him access to a window that reflected the entire world to him. Not only this, technology for Pichai is also synonymous with bonding closely as a family. He remembers how every evening they all were hooked to the television as Doordarshan’s special rendition “Sare Jahan Se Accha” played. When he tried to explain this to his colleagues the next day, he eventually gave up and just showed them the YouTube video. 

Letting his dreams take a flight

During a virtual conference last year, Pichai recounted the difficulties he faced when he bade adieu to India and moved to the US to pursue his course at Stanford University about three decades ago.

Sundar Pichai took his first flight ever, the price of which was equivalent to his father’s annual income. California was nothing what he had imagined it to be. He remembers how expensive America was for him because just a one-minute call back home cost more than $2. So much so, a backpack in America equaled the amount of his father’s monthly salary. 

The 48-year-old top executive remarked that the only thing besides luck that got him this far was his unending passion for technology and an open mind. Pichai studied Metallurgical Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, and went ahead to pursue his Master’s degree from Stanford and an MBA from Wharton School. It was 2004 when he joined Google and led the development of Google Toolbar and Google Chrome, which has become the most popular internet browser today.

Pichai said that when he was young, he eternally had to wait for new technologies and opportunities that came along with it. Today, he said, people in India no longer have to wait and twiddle their thumbs for technology to come to them - it is all available in just a matter of a few minutes, and that’s the power of technology. 

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