There are some books you don’t “start.” You gather the courage to open them. When I picked up Coping With Cancer by Ramendra Kumar, I wasn’t just holding a Kindle edition. I was holding the possibility of fear. Cancer is not an abstract word for me. I know a couple of survivors personally. I’ve seen hospital corridors. I’ve heard the silence after a diagnosis. So yes, it took something in me to turn those first few pages. And within minutes, I realized this wasn’t a book
I opened Stories of Courage on a day when nothing dramatic was happening in my life—and that’s exactly why it unsettled me. No crisis. No breaking news. Just an ordinary day. Yet within a few pages, the ground under that ordinariness began to shift. Not violently. Gently. The way perspective changes when you overhear someone else’s truth on a bus or at a café table. You keep reading, but part of you has already gone inward, recalibrating what you complain about, what you fear