A roadmap for reimagining Kerala
Few could have borne the indescribable tragedies Mathai Mammen and his wife, Anna, endured. What could be more painful than losing two daughters, four years apart, when both the kids were just six years old? If Mia died of a still-unknown illness in 2010, an undiagnosed case of appendicitis took away Laine four years later. Mathai and Anna were repeatedly struck by these horrendous personal blows, despite being top health professionals in the US with ready access to the best medical care available globally. Yet, this didn't numb Mammen into inaction. He dedicated himself as a “lifelong tribute to Mia and Laine”, to developing extraordinary medicines for patients with serious diseases that have long remained undruggable.
Mammen (59), whose parents migrated from Pathanamthitta to Canada when he was a toddler, is the chairman and CEO of Parabilis Medicines, a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Mammen’s career has followed in the footsteps of his mother, Molly Mammen, a technician scientist in a cancer lab at Canada’s Dalhousie University in Halifax.
This March, Parabilis’s newly developed drug, Zolucateride, was approved as an “orphan drug” to treat desmoid tumours by the US Food and Drug Administration. Orphan drug status is granted to medicines that treat rare diseases affecting fewer than 20,000 people in the US. Parabilis is now set to receive $125 million from Regeneron Pharmaceuticals Inc. to develop a novel class of therapeutics.
Mammen, a PhD from Harvard University and an MD from Harvard/MIT, earlier headed the R&D of the drug division of Johnson and Johnson. He is on the board of Sandoz and is an advisor to many investment firms. In 2025, Mammen's salary was $1.3 million, and he owns $85 million in stock in Parabilis, a NASDAQ-listed company. His eldest son, Mathew (22), a brilliant student and dancer, plans to pursue a PhD in Physics.
Mammen is among an eclectic set of remarkable people with roots in Kerala who have made a global mark, featured in a recent book edited by two US-based Malayalis, Ignatius Chithelen and Cherian Samuel. The book, Kerala and Keralites: The Promise and Challenges (Bryant, 2026), includes essays by prominent scholars on Kerala and interviews, published in the Global Indian Times, a US-based free online site. Besides scholarly articles on various aspects of Kerala, the book contains engaging profiles of entrepreneurs, artists, academics, and writers, both well-known and otherwise. All embellished with a lot of statistics and interesting personal details.
Chithelen is a chartered financial analyst who has degrees in multiple subjects including in Journalism from Columbia University. Samuel, formerly with the World Bank is an economist with a Phd from University of Maryland and an alumni of the Centre for Development Studies, Thiruvananthapuram.
Dev Itticheriya (50), also a second-generation immigrant with Kerala roots in the US, is another success story. Former CEO of MongoDB, a prominent software firm based in New York, Itticheriya migrated from Kerala with his parents at 12 and graduated in electrical engineering from Rutgers University. MongoDB sells software which enables developers to build querying, indexing, and other database applications. With $2 billion in revenue and a market value of $28 billion, Ittycheriya’s annual emoluments totalled $16 million in 2025. The company has 5000 employees and over 60,000 customers across 100 countries. Itticheriya was the co-founder of Attica, an early cloud services company, and later BladeLogic, which was subsequently taken over by BMC for $900 million, after which he became its president. In 2012, Itticheriya joined Greylock Partners, a venture capital firm, and two years later became CEO of MongoDB. After stepping down in 2025. He serves as a senior advisor to the venture capital firm Sequoia Capital.
Unlike Mammen and Itticheriya, second-generation immigrants who grew up and studied in the US, Rajesh (Raj) Subramanian is largely a homegrown success story. Currently President and CEO of FedEx Corporation (Revenue: $88 billion), a global giant in package delivery, Raj lived and studied in Kerala and Mumbai until he left for the US for his master's. Son of former Kerala Police Chief C. Subramanian and Dr Kamalammal in Thiruvananthapuram, Raj studied in the city’s Loyola School and graduated in chemical engineering from IIT, Mumbai. After earning his MS from Syracuse University and MBA from the University of Texas at Austin he joined FedEx in 1991. He soon moved to Hong Kong to oversee marketing and customer service. He later became President of FedEx Express before returning to headquarters in Memphis as senior vice president of International Marketing. In 2019, Raj took over as CEO and drew $12.9 million in salary last year. His wife, Uma, also an IIM Ahmedabad graduate, worked at FedEx, as did his two brothers.
Another interesting story is of the Punjabi-Malayali couple who founded Chai Box, a small-batch tea company in Atlanta, Georgia. The company, owned by Monica, from a Punjabi immigrant family and her husband Sundeep Sunny from Kerala, specialises in authentic loose-leaf chai blends, chai concentrates, and sustainably sourced spices inspired by traditional Indian family recipes and regions across India. Monica launched Chai Box as an online sales site as a part-time business in 2016; it became their full-time focus during the COVID outbreak, when the couple faced difficulties with their jobs.
Chai Box gained wide popularity after media superstar Oprah Winfrey endorsed one of its products. The monthly sales quadrupled to $377000. They launched the first Chai Box cafe in July in Atlanta. The book also features well-known Malayali billionaire entrepreneurs outside the US too, such as Shamsheer Vayalil and Sunny Varkey. Vayalil ($1.5 billion), founder and chairman of Burjeel Holdings of Abu Dhabi, runs over 100 healthcare establishments in many countries including the Lakeshore Hospital in Kochi. A radiologist from Kozhikode who migrated to Abu Dhabi in 2006, Vayalil (49) was initially backed in his business by his billionaire father-in-law, MA Yussafali of the LuLu Group.
Sunny Varkey (worth $4 billion) of the Dubai-based GEMS Education, runs one of the world's largest multinational school chains, built up from the foundation laid by his school teacher parents -Mariamma and KS Varkey. They migrated from Pathanamthitta to Dubai in 1959 when the emirate was only a minor port town, but on the cusp of massive transformation. They began teaching English to Arabs in their small apartment and later set up the region’s first school -Our Own English School - for Indian immigrants. Interestingly, Sunny (69), the transnational educational entrepreneur, hasn't gone to college!
The book’s only rags-to-riches Indian business story is that of PC Musthafa the son of a ginger farm wage labourer in Wayanad. He had dropped out of Class VI to work as a farm labourer for a daily wage of Rs 10 when he found it difficult to eat three meals a day. Today, Musthafa, is the CEO and co-founder of the Rs 2200 crore company, iD Fresh Food, which makes high-quality idli-dosa batter, Malabar Parathas, chutneys, coffee, etc. The firm was set up in a 50 sq. ft. grocery store with an investment of Rs 25000 from Musthafa, who was working in Dubai then, by his cousins in Bengaluru in 2005. In 2008, Musthafa returned to join id Fresh, which ran at a loss until 2013. In 2025, it registered a revenue of Rs 681 crores and has 30,000 outlets across India, the UAE, Oman, the US, and the UK. It raised $119 million from venture capital funds and was valued at Rs 2200 crore in 2021.
It was his school teacher who transformed Musthafa’s life. After dropping out of school, Musthafa had worked as a farm labourer until this teacher found him and persuaded him to return to his studies. “He even tutored me for free. Because of him, I topped my class in maths, which pushed me to study harder,” said Musthafa. His school teachers sponsored his college studies and helped him organise free food and boarding. He was made fun of by many for being in charity but it made him only more determined. Musthafa eventually won a degree in computer science from NIT, Calicut and found a job in Dubai. In 2007, he also earned an MBA from IIM Bengaluru before joining id Fresh, full-time. In 2018, the famed Harvard Kennedy School invited him to speak about his incredible and inspiring story at its India conference.
Others featured in the book include cricketer Sanju Samson, diplomat T P Sreenivasan, author and physician Abraham Verghese, journalist Vinod Jose, writer Shashi Warrier, “missile woman” Tessy Thomas, artist Visakh Menon, academic Vinod Menon and also a special person: Karthyayani Amma, who finished first grade at 96. There are also articles on many remarkable Malayalis of the past: economist Dr K N Raj, poet K V Simon, scientist Janaki Ammal, mathematician T K Radha, and Abraham Salem, the “Jewish Gandhi of Kochi”.
The book’s key contribution is its examination of Kerala’s critical contemporary challenges. Comprehensive articles by and interviews with leading experts explore a range of topics: the Kerala Development Model (K P Kannan), education (Michel Tharakan), agriculture, nursing, tourism (Sunil Mani), diaspora (Chithalen, Samuel), climate change (Vinod Thomas), ageing (Mathew Cherian), and economy (Thirthankar Roy).
Above all, the scholarly foreword by Paul Kattuman, Professor of Economics at Cambridge Judge Business School, University of Cambridge (himself a prominent Malayali), offers an honest and insightful analysis of Kerala’s successes and failures, as well as a roadmap for building a new Kerala Model for the future.
As concerns and awareness grow across the state about the challenges contemporary Kerala faces in multiple sectors, and the need to reimagine the state’s future, the book is an ideal source of vital information and a valuable guide for the way forward.