Study Abroad Stories & Guides for Kerala Students

In the early 1960s, West Germany's hospitals had a problem no one back home could fix. The country was rebuilding fast, its healthcare system expanding just as quickly, but German women — under the pull of an old social expectation known as Kinder, Küche, Kirche, children, kitchen, church — weren't entering nursing in the numbers the hospitals needed. The shortage was worst in old-age homes and psychiatric care, the wards nobody was rushing to staff.

The Catholic Church, which ran a large share of Germany's hospitals, looked south for an answer — much further south than most people expect. Bishops in Germany reached out to their counterparts in Kerala, where they'd heard there were young, capable women eager for training and work abroad. Contracts followed. Teenage girls and young women, many barely out of school, boarded ships and later flights to a country whose language they didn't speak, to train as nurses in cities they'd never seen. Documented in Shiny Benjamin's film Translated Lives — A Migration Revisited, the arrangement became, by most accounts, a genuine success. Many of those nurses built full careers in Germany. Some took German citizenship. Kerala associations sprang up around them, and some of those same associations still gather today, three generations later, to celebrate Onam and Christmas in German cities their grandmothers once arrived in as strangers.
That story rarely comes up when people talk about Kerala and migration. The word that usually comes up instead is Gulf.

There's a ceramic plate that's been sitting in my bookshelf for close to two decades now. Blue pottery, a little chipped at one edge, with the image of a university printed across its face — a souvenir a school friend brought back from Tilburg, where he spent a semester as an undergraduate. I remember being more curious about the plate than the place. The Netherlands wasn't a country we talked about much, growing up. It didn't have a story attached to it the way the UK or the US did.

A few weeks ago, I sat across from a student planning his own move to Germany. Somewhere in the conversation, almost as an aside, he mentioned that his older brother was already in the Netherlands — settled into student life there, comfortably, unremarkably. Two decades between a ceramic plate and that sentence, and the Netherlands still occupies roughly the same place in Kerala's imagination: present, familiar at the edges, never quite the headline.

That's worth pausing on. A country doesn't stay quietly present for twenty years by accident. It usually means the people who've actually been there don't feel the need to make noise about it.

A few minutes from Times Square, there's a restaurant called Chatti, built around clay cooking pots and the toddy-shop cuisine of Kerala. Its founder, Regi Mathew, grew up in Kottayam — the same town this blog is written from. Before New York, he built Kappa Chakka Kandhari into one of India's most celebrated Kerala-cuisine restaurants, with locations in Chennai and Bengaluru. Before that, he was just another student figuring out that the kitchen, not the classroom, was where he wanted to spend his life.

A little further north, in Kollam, another Malayali boy was selling pomelo fruit in a local market to earn pocket money. Decades later, Suresh Pillai — better known simply as Chef Pillai — would go on to work in Michelin-recognised kitchens in London, compete on MasterChef: The Professionals UK, and eventually return home to Kerala as culinary director at The Raviz, only to launch the now-famous ‘Chef Pillai’ restaurant group.

Last month, a parent walked into our Kottayam office with a printout in her hand. It was a list titled "NMC Approved Medical Universities Abroad 2026," downloaded from a website she'd found at midnight, three days after her son's NEET result came in. She wanted us to simply confirm which of the thirty-odd names on that list were genuine.

We had to tell her something that surprises most families: that list doesn't exist. Not outdated. Not incomplete. It simply isn't a thing NMC publishes anymore.
That one conversation tells you almost everything about why MBBS abroad has become so confusing for Kerala families in the last few years. The destinations have multiplied, the rules have quietly been rewritten, and most of what's circulating online — PDFs, WhatsApp forwards, "approved lists" — is either outdated or was never official to begin with.

So let's actually clear this up.

The other day, I was renewing one of my Adobe software subscriptions. Like most of us, I wasn't paying much attention to the invoice until something caught my eye.
The bill had come from Ireland.
I actually looked twice.
Adobe? Ireland?

Earlier today, Tom walked into our office with a beaming face that every study abroad counsellor recognises instantly. His German student visa had been approved.

If you've attended enough weddings, family gatherings, or housewarming functions in Kerala, you've probably heard the question. ‘Mon evideya ippol?’ And somewhere in the conversation comes the answer: ‘UK-il aanu.’

It costs just around twenty-five thousand rupees to take a flight from Kochi to Port Louis in Mauritius.  And if you are tired of all the beaches in Kerala, that would be something you would consider for a holiday with a tropical vibe. And you mention Mauritius to any other Malayali, and just like me, the first image that comes to their mind would be a beach. White sand. Blue water. Luxury resorts. Honeymoon packages. In fact, Mauritius is probably one of the few countries that Kerala families know quite well as a holiday destination, yet rarely consider as a study destination.

And that is precisely what makes it interesting. Behind the postcard scenery lies a country quietly attracting international students through affordable education, English-medium programmes, and practical, career-focused pathways. Sometimes the best study abroad destinations are the ones hiding in plain sight.

For years, when Malayali students spoke about studying abroad, the conversation usually travelled along predictable routes — UK, Canada, Australia, perhaps Germany if somebody in the family had recently discovered Ausbildung.