Hours after P Sundararajan aka Sundar Pichai was announced as the CEO of the newly-structured Google under the parent company Alphabet, his Wikipedia page turned into a battleground, a testimony to two facts - Indians love taking credit for accomplishments by one of ours anywhere in the world, and the schooling scene in Chennai is competitive.
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 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.
His college-life is not a subject of debate, he completed his engineering in IIT Kharagpur and then went to Stanford and later Wharton. His schooling history however is not clear.
As on July 30, 2015, the Wikipedia page mentioned that his schooling was from two schools - Jawahar Vidyalaya, a school in Ashok Nagar in Chennai, and Vanavani, a school in the IIT-Madras campus. The box on right-side of the page also mentioned Jawahar Vidayala as his ‘Alma Mater’.
Web War
The series of recent edits running into more than 75 at the time of writing, started at 20:53 GMT on August 10. Since then, several users have tried to change the name of the school he studied in. The names Padma Sheshadri Bala Bhavan School, Jawahar Vidyalaya, GRT Mahalakshmi Vidyalaya, Vanavani Matriculation and All Angels School have cropped up, and later taken down. The PSBB school Wiki page even lists him as a reputed alumni, and TOI has also referred to PSBB as his school. Going by the Wiki edits, one of the editors seems obsessed with the ‘fact’ that he led the cricket team to victory in the TN regional tournament.
Here are some of the screenshots of his Wikipedia edits made on August 10 and August 11. Look closely, over the past few hours, his schooling information has been changed several times.
Screenshots of Pichai’s Wikipedia Edits
(Ramanthan S writes for The News Minute)
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