Sundar Pichai: 5 interesting facts about Google CEO you never heard before

Sundar Pichia is celebrating his 49th birth anniversary today. Born on June 10, 1972 in Madurai, Tamil Nadu, India, Pichai joined Google in the year 2004 as a lead for product management and innovation efforts for a suite of Google’s client software products including Google Chrome, Chrome OS and Google Drive. He became the CEO of the world’s biggest tech company Google on August 10, 2015. On his birth anniversary, here are five interesting facts about Sundar Pichai that we are sure you did not know before we told you…

5 interesting facts about Google CEO Sundar Pichai

– The now Google CEO’s full name is Pichai Sundararajan. Pichai is born in a middle-class family in Madurai, Tamil Nadu. His mother Lakshmi was a stenographer while father was an electrical engineer at GEC, the British conglomerate. All his childhood, Pichai grew up in a two room apartment in Ashok Nagar, Chennai.

-Did you know, Pichai who heads Google now once lacked basic necessities like a refrigerator. In a past interview to NYT, Pichai said “we lived in a kind of modest house, shared with tenants. We would sleep on living room floor. There was a drought when I was growing up and we had anxiety. Even now, I can never sleep without a bottle of water beside my bed. Other houses had refrigerators, and then we finally got one. It was a big deal.”

-Sundar Pichai married her college girlfriend Anjali, née Wiki. Both met at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur and were classmate.

-Pichai loves to play football and cricket. In an interview with NYT, Pichai revealed about his love for these sports and said, “I had a lot of time to read. I was also processing a lot. I read whatever I could get my hands on. I read Dickens. Friends, playing street cricket, reading books – that was kind of the totality of life. But you never felt lacking for anything.”

-Did you know that Pichai was selected as a contender for Microsoft CEO in 2014 which was eventually taken over by Satya Nadella.