A Madras boy makes Chennai proud!

I sometimes wonder we in India are a selfless lot, since we take great pride in chest thumping a fellow Indian’s achievement with gay abandon. Indian media these days goes a step further and makes it a point to celebrate the occasion by giving us a byte from the tea shop from where the celebrity had his last bite.

We just don’t praise him we leave no stone unturned to claim our share of the limelight. Someone or the other knows the someone who knew someone who was close to our new found celebrity. Call this 6 Degrees of separation from fame?

The elevation of Sundar Pichai as the CEO of Google today is one such incidence that has gone berserk on the social media. Well here’s my share of claim to his fame, we were born in the same year and his birth date (12) happens to be a mirror image of mine (21), and that’s not all, we share a rare numerical connection, the squares of the birth dates are also mirror images of each other. Wow! So you see how close we were!

It is indeed commendable that a Gen X compatriot went on to head a company without whose help Gen Z would not survive today. From an Indian perspective the rise of these guys was inevitable. Thanks mainly to the institutions set up in the 50’s and 60’s; within years of gaining independence, such visionary decisions on setting up of educational institutions of quality have gone a long way in shaping the nation. Irrespective of political affiliations I believe this need to be acknowledged and appreciated. A true example of one reaps, what one sows.

The eighties and the early nineties were the coming of age of these institutions and the products of these institutions during these years were juxtaposed between an opportunity filled fast moving world and a complacent India that had lost its fire-in-the-belly post-independence.

This was essentially the pre coaching center, pre-parental aspiration era. An era when the parents were too poor to have aspirations and the kids were so full of dreams, so much so, they forced their parents to reluctantly toe the line. Toe the line, not to enrol them into the most successful of tuition / coaching centers but just to buy them an air ticket to pursue their dreams, the dream they had achieved by sheer hard work and nothing else. Unfortunately, today it’s a reversal of roles, the parents are full of aspirations and the kids are too poor in spirit to dream!

Congratulations Sundar Pichai, this is definitely not a rag to riches story, all stories of our era are Kumar shirts to Louis Phillipe. The middle class successes that we see these days are not just stories but epics that need to be well documented, the good and the bad. Otherwise why would the first Mc Namarical performer from India be behind bars now? So enjoy your moment of glory responsibly with the usual Madrasian humility.

The Madras boy, who is today in the limelight was born and brought up in Madras and left it before it became Chennai and returned to bring glory to Chennai. What Madras sowed then, Chennai reaps today.