The Boy from Ashok Nagar
When I read that Sundar Pichai's family waited five years on a government list just to get a telephone, and that when it finally arrived the neighbors came to his house to make their calls, I stopped reading. Not because the detail surprised me. Because I lived it.
We had the phone in our house in Ashok Nagar. That made us, by the logic of the neighborhood, a kind of public utility. People knocked and asked politely and we handed over the receiver and gave them what privacy we could. Nobody abused the arrangement. Scarcity makes people careful with things that belong, in some informal way, to everyone.
My first international call was to the BBC at Bush House in London. That was the only international number I had. I don't remember now exactly what prompted it, what question I needed answered or what program I was responding to, but I remember the fact of it: that the world outside India was, for a long time, reachable through a single telephone number I had written down somewhere and kept. The distance between Ashok Nagar and London collapsed into a crackle on the line. I stood there holding the receiver, aware that something had shifted, that the world had just gotten slightly smaller in a way I couldn't fully explain.
The television was the same story. When the magic box arrived in our house, the neighbors came for that too. People crowded into the room and watched in a silence that was something close to reverence. Whatever was on the screen mattered less than the screen itself, the fact of moving images in a Chennai living room, the sheer improbability of it. I think about that room sometimes when I read about immersive technology and the metaverse and all the vocabulary we keep inventing for new kinds of wonder. The first wonder was simpler. It was just light and motion in a box, and twenty people holding their breath around it.
Sundar Pichai grew up in the same neighborhood, and he says he feels a sense of urgency about technology, about getting it to people faster than bureaucracy allows. I think I understand where that urgency comes from. It comes from knowing exactly what people are waiting for, because you watched them wait. You handed them the receiver. You moved over on the bench so they could see the screen. You grow up understanding, at a cellular level, that access is not evenly distributed, and that the gap between having and not having is not abstract. It is a neighbor standing at your door, asking politely.
He built quietly for a decade while people called him too cautious, too sedate, not visionary enough for the moment. Analysts called for his resignation when ChatGPT arrived and made Google look flat-footed. The criticism was loud and not entirely wrong. But he had declared Google an AI-first company in 2016, years before the terminology was fashionable, and he kept building through the noise. Now Google sits at a four trillion dollar valuation and its AI infrastructure is woven into daily life in ways most people don't stop to notice. He didn't need to be the loudest person in the conversation. He needed to be right, and patient, and willing to keep going when the room was skeptical.
I am not writing this to celebrate a billionaire. I am writing it because some stories reach through the professional distance and touch something personal, and this one did that the moment I read the word Ashok Nagar. Shared geography does something to you. It bypasses the usual filters. You stop thinking about market capitalization and start thinking about the heat of a Chennai afternoon, the particular quality of light through a window, twenty people in a room watching a television that nobody quite believed was real.
Fate plays a role in where any of us ends up. Luck plays a role. Hard work plays a role. Knowledge plays a role, and I would argue it plays a longer game than any of the others. The boy from Ashok Nagar understood that early. So did a lot of people who grew up in that neighborhood, in that city, in that India of waiting lists and shared telephones and crowded rooms gathered around something new.
I had one international phone number and I used it. You work with what you have. You keep the number written down. You make the call.
