Sundar Pichai: India PM Modi joins social media joy
- Published
Sundar Pichai's appointment is being seen as an Indian triumph on social media
Google's surprise announcement that it has created its own parent company, Alphabet, may be the news of the hour across the tech world, but in India, the headlines are all about Sundar Pichai.
The elevation of the 43-year-old Indian origin American to CEO of Google is making waves across Indian media and social media outlets, with many seeing his rise as nothing less than a triumph for the country.
Mr Pichai was born and schooled in Chennai (formerly Madras), in south India.
Among the latest to congratulate Mr Pichai was Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who tweeted at him from his personal account.
The tag #Alphabet was one of the top trends in the Indian twittersphere following Google's announcement, but most of the tweets centred around Mr Pichai. Even the usually staid state broadcast channel Doordarshan could barely contain its excitement:
Other media channels followed suit, quickly pushing out profiles and factoids about the new Google CEO for the consumption of an excited public. And India's Twitter has been awash with tweets like these:
There were also these:
According to a profile in Bloomberg magazine, external, Mr Pichai's upbringing was humble. His family lived in a two room apartment. He didn't have a room - he slept on the living room floor, as did his younger brother.
The family didn't own a television, or a car.
After graduating from IIT Kharagpur, he was offered a scholarship at Stanford, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Mr Pichai's appointment has also reportedly triggered an online Wikipedia war in India, with the battleground being his school.
According to the Indian news website, external The News Minute, "Soon after his name hit the web as the new CEO, his Wikipedia page was witnessing nothing short of a web-war, with people altering his Wikipedia page to change the name of the school he studied in his hometown in Chennai. The surgery on his page, we believe, was motivated by (presumably) alumni wanting their schools to get the credit for grooming Google's top executive from India."