Let’s begin by ranting about how awful it is to travel on the Bypass to and fro five times a week. That’s about 10-15 hours, about one-and-a-half-workday every week spent travelling on “roads” in steel cages that pass for “vehicles”. It hardly needs mentioning that the end of such a pilgrimage leaves one in quite the rant-friendly state-of-mind.
It was on one such night that a quick look at my social media feed revealed a nation revelling in the elevation of a certain Sundar Pichai to the post of Google CEO. Now, I had been following Pichai’s rapid growth up the corporate structure at Google for a few years now, especially since he moved from managing the team in charge of Google Chrome to managing the development of Android.
Disclaimer: I am a major time fan of Android, especially the vanilla version that Google releases as an open-source OS to be made amazing by the likes of Cyanogen or Motorola, or to be made unusable by the likes of Samsung.
Although most of my experiments with Android involved taking low-end devices running Froyo and Gingerbread and pushing them to run the likes of Jellybean and KitKat, the development the OS underwent under Pichai to the grown-up version of Lollipop was incredible. No wonder he was appointed CEO.
Which was not the reason why the entire nation was crazy for him. They were simply crazy because he was an Indian, had been at IIT Kharagpur for a while, and had now really gone places. It also helped that he had replied to a tweet from nationalistic fan No. 1, our esteemed PM, saying that he looked forward to meeting him soon. You know what happens when bhakts go on overdrive. Things start trending.
carvaan 