There are so many ways to spend a Friday morning. 9 am to 11 am. One could be glued to an outdated iPhone 12, sending sundry text messages while stuck in traffic. Or lounging in bright blue pyjamas contrasted with a starched white linen shirt in the study at home, to look sharp for the call on Google Teams at 10. Or mindlessly watching YouTube Shorts over morning tea, sipping the vicarious pleasure of a blooper made by a political rival. Or pretending to be polite on an intrusive phone call from a pushy Delhi acquaintance. Rush. Rush. Busy. Busy. That’s why they call us the human, race!

But one Friday morning last month, I found myself taking a break from the human race. Two and a half hours at a most unlikely location: The reception area at the David H Koch Center for Cancer Care at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. A dear friend’s 59-year-old wife had recently been diagnosed with Stage 4 metastatic non-small-cell lung cancer, which had spread to the calf muscle. My spouse and I accompanied our friends to their first appointment with the oncologist, an expert in large-cell cancers. The patient, her husband and Tonuca, my wife, were with the specialist on the third floor for a little over two hours. I opted for a lonely beige sofa just inside the main entrance of the renowned facility.

I put my mobile phone on silent and stored it away in the pocket of my tracksuit bottom. This was a morning to take pictures in my mind. Just observe. The fantasy captions would write themselves.

Sitting right across me on another beige sofa was a couple who looked to be in their late 70s or even 80s. They had picked up coffee from the cafeteria at one end of the reception and chatted away with the enthusiasm of collegians on their first date. Obviously, one of them had the Big C. I couldn’t tell who. They were enjoying each other’s company. Then there was a mum in a wheelchair who was screaming at her son on the phone. He was late, so she decided to go upstairs for her appointment herself.

Who else did I see at the reception? Stories without names. A man with a caregiver who might have been a colleague, a neighbour or a friend. Then, a stylishly turned-out couple in their 50s, who could have well been on holiday on a beach in Hawaii. But no. Here they were, checking in early for a doctor’s appointment in Manhattan.

No one says it better, on this subject than Siddhartha Mukherjee in his must-read, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer. Mukherjee writes, “But the story of leukaemia — the story of cancer — isn’t the story of doctors who struggle and survive, moving from one institution to another. It is the story of patients who struggle and survive, moving from one embankment of illness to another. Resilience, inventiveness, and survivorship — qualities often ascribed to great physicians — are reflected qualities, emanating first from those who struggle with illness and only then mirrored by those who treat them. If the history of medicine is told through the stories of doctors, it is because their contributions stand in place of the more substantive heroism of their patients.”

After the poetry of Siddhartha Mukherjee’s writing, here is the prose of the reality of cancer in India:

• One out of nine people is expected to face a cancer diagnosis during their lifetime.
• The estimated number of new cancer cases in India was 14.6 lakh in 2022.
• After cardiovascular diseases, cancer has become the leading cause of death in India.
• Every eight minutes, one woman dies of cervical cancer in the country.
• Lung and mouth cancer are the most common cancers affecting men. For women, it is breast and cervix cancer, and lymphoid leukaemia for children below the age of 14.
• One of the major causes leading to cancer is tobacco use, associated with 35 to 50 per cent of all cancers in men and 17 per cent in women.
• Every day, 3,700 people die of tobacco-related diseases.
• Four per cent of all cancers diagnosed in India are those affecting children.

One of the earliest communication campaigns to increase cancer awareness was created in 1978 by Ogilvy & Mather for the Indian Cancer Society. As David Ogilvy wrote in his masterpiece Ogilvy on Advertising, “The purpose of the campaign was to change attitudes from ignorance and fatalism to understanding and optimism. Only then could people be persuaded to have regular check-ups at the free clinics of the Society”.

The advertising campaign with “positive messaging” featured happy pictures of “real patients” who had been cured of cancer. The caption to these joyous photographs was a simple yet powerful message: “Life after cancer… it’s worth living”.

[This article was also published in The Indian Express | Friday, August 2, 2024]