Exploring Coping With Cancer by Ramendra Kumar A Review by Sameer Gudhate

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 about illness alone. It was about orientation. About where you choose to stand when life tilts violently.

What struck me first was the author’s refusal to dramatize his suffering for sympathy. The narrative is steady, almost composed — like someone who has walked through a storm and is now describing the wind patterns instead of the thunder. When he recounts the moment of diagnosis, the doctor delivering the verdict as casually as a weather update, I paused. I reread that line. Not because it was sensational, but because it was painfully ordinary. That’s how life-changing news often arrives — without background music.

The prose is simple, but not simplistic. There is research, yes. There are case studies rooted in Indian contexts. But the emotional core of the book is lived experience. And that difference matters. This isn’t advice from a distance. Its reflection forged in ICU corridors, chemo cycles, septic shocks, and long nights of neuropathic pain.

One of the most powerful shifts the book offers is linguistic. We are wired to ask “Why me?” when something breaks. Kumar gently, firmly nudges us toward a different question: “How now?” That pivot — from explanation to response — is the spine of the book. And it lingers.

There’s a sentence that stayed with me long after I closed the app: you are the artist of your own life, even in crisis. It sounds almost too neat at first. But in the context of a man carrying both an insulin pump and a stoma bag, after multiple surgeries, it stops being motivational and starts being defiant. This is not toxic positivity. It is chosen posture.

The ecosystem of support he describes — temples lighting lamps, masjids offering duas, friends sending chants — feels deeply Indian and deeply human. Illness here is not a solo narrative; it becomes communal. His portrayal of Madhavi, his wife, never slips into melodrama. Instead, it quietly reinforces a theme the book returns to again and again: resilience is rarely individual. It is relational.

If I had to identify the book’s strengths, three stand out clearly. First, emotional transparency without self-pity. Second, practical coping mechanisms that don’t feel clinical. Third, the courage to talk openly about bodily realities many would hide. There is dignity in that candor.

If I were to gently point at a resistance point, it would be this: at times the optimism feels almost superhuman. For a reader still in the middle of their own chaos, that level of steadiness may feel intimidating. But perhaps that is also the point. The book does not promise comfort; it models capacity.

Reading this, I kept thinking of a friend who once told me after remission, “Cancer didn’t teach me to be strong. It showed me I already was.” That is the emotional trajectory of this narrative. Transformation here is not about becoming someone else. It is about discovering the depth you didn’t know you possessed.

This is not just a handbook for patients or caregivers. It is a mirror for anyone navigating uncertainty. Because the “Big C” may be cancer, but crisis wears many faces — loss, failure, illness, betrayal. The framework remains relevant.

If you are in a fragile season, this book might feel like sitting beside someone who has survived the same mountain and is not preaching from the summit, but walking beside you on the incline.

Some books entertain. Some inform. A few recalibrate you.

Coping With Cancer does not deny the darkness. It simply insists that you can still choose the color palette.

And that insistence, quiet but unwavering, is its lasting impact.

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