Varghese Kuriakose

Babu Kuriakose could not leave a broken machine alone. At nine he was repairing the neighbourhood's radio sets in Kuruppanthara; at fourteen he rebuilt a rice-mill motor with parts salvaged from a bullock cart; at seventeen he walked into the entrance examination hall with a borrowed pen and left with a place at IIT Bombay.

He graduated in Mechanical Engineering in 1973 and went straight to Tata Steel in Jamshedpur, where he spent thirteen happy years in the foundries and rolling mills and learned, he said, everything that mattered about steel and about people who work beside fire. In 1986 he came home to Kerala with modest savings, a young family and a stubborn idea: that Kerala could make precision castings as good as anything made in Pune. He founded Kuriakose Precision Castings at Kalamassery in 1987, with eleven workers and a second-hand furnace. At its peak the foundry employed one hundred and forty people, and he knew the name of every worker's child. During the 2018 floods he opened the factory floor to neighbours whose homes were underwater and cooked rice for two hundred people on the canteen stove.

On Sundays he sat in the third pew at St. Mary's Church in Kuruppanthara, followed by his wife Annamma's appam and stew. He loved the Nehru Trophy Boat Race, fishing in Vembanad Lake and old Malayalam film songs sung off-key in the car. He died peacefully at home on 10 October 2025, aged seventy-five. He leaves Annamma, his wife of forty-nine years; his son Jacob, who now runs the foundry; his daughter Dr. Rachel in Aberdeen; and four grandchildren, one of whom has already taken apart the family washing machine.