- Saturday, March 01, 2025
The Google CEO, who was born in India’s Tamil Nadu in 1972, stayed at the house till he was around 20.
By: Shubham Ghosh
C Manikandan, a small-time film actor and producer in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, has done something which he might not have imagined in his wildest thought — buying the family home of Google chief executive Sundar Pichai in a quiet, residential area of Ashok Nagar in Chennai, the state capital.
According to The Hindu BusinessLine that reported about it, Manikandan did not waste a minute after learning that the property where Pichai was born was up for sale and decided to buy it immediately. However, he had to wait for some months since Sundar’s father RS Pichai was in the US at the time.
“Sundar Pichai has made our country proud and buying the house where he lived will be a proud achievement of my life,” Manikandan was quoted as saying by the Indian news outlet.
Also a real-estate developer, Manikandan said more than the property belonging to the world famous individual, it was the humility of his parents that floored him, the report added. He has constructed and delivered around 300 houses under Chellappas Builders, his brand.
“Sundar’s mother made a filter coffee herself and his father offered me the documents right at the first meeting,” Manikandan told the news outlet, adding, “I was spellbound by their humility and humble approach.”
He also said that the senior Pichai was firm on not using the name of his son to expedite the property’s registration or transfer procedure.
“In fact, his father waited for hours at the registration office, paid all necessary taxes before handing over the documents to me,” he was quoted as saying by The Hindu BusinessLine. Manikandan also said that Pichai broke down for a few minutes while handing over the house’s documents to him since it was his first property.
Sundar Pichai was born in Madurai in Tamil Nadu and brought up in Chennai before he left the city to study metallurgical engineering at IIT Kharagpur in the eastern Indian state of West Bengal in the late 1980s. One of his neighbours said the Google CEO lived in that house till around the age of 20.
He was in Chennai last December and during then, distributed money and some appliances from the home to security personnel, the neighbour added.
Manikandan said the senior Pichai bore the cost of razing down the property and handed over the plot for development. He will now build a villa in the space over the next one-and-half years, the report added.
