The decision that defines his life is the 1975 resignation: leaving a post at India's premier nuclear research institution, at the height of a scientific career, to take science to villages instead. That choice sat at the centre of the people's science movement in Kerala, whose premise was that scientific knowledge should not stay locked inside laboratories and English-language journals but be carried into local languages and everyday problems. His work on the smokeless stove is a good illustration — an unglamorous technology aimed at indoor air pollution in ordinary kitchens rather than a frontier research problem. His involvement in designing the Malayalam typewriter keyboard layout belongs to the same instinct: making the tools of knowledge usable in the language people actually speak.