Chennai: The flood of photos and encomia on social media celebrating the arrival of prominent personalities at the poll booths of Tamil Nadu on Thursday had one big howler. One of those pictures that went viral was of Google CEO Sundar Pichai and the caption hailing the son-of-the-soil flying all the way from California to cast his vote in Tamil Nadu.
Some even recalled an exciting similarity in a Kollywood hit-the Diwali release Sarkar in which Vijay played the hero Sundar Ramasamy, a role inspired by the Google CEO, coming home in Tamil Nadu just to fulfill his patriotic duty of voting.
Even the international media quickly picked up the sensational story of Pichai coming home to vote, but better sense dawned in a few hours as the wise ones clarified it was an old picture of his visiting alma mater IIT-Kharagpur in January 2017; and besides, being a US citizen, he cannot vote in India.
It appeared that in all this excitement of a high-stakes and high-decibel election in Tamil Nadu, someone threw in a new element to further excite the atmosphere, perhaps even lend a hand to the hard campaigning to enthuse the citizens to vote. If a celebrity like Pichai is shown as flying down all the way from the U.S. just to cast his vote in Tamil Nadu, that might encourage even the obstinate cynic to come out and head for the poll booth.
Born in Madurai, Pichai did his schooling in Chennai and went to do engineering at IIT-Kharagpur before moving to the US for MS at Stanford and MBA at the University of Pennsylvania.
