Chai, cancer and unbounded love

Viji Venkatesh hosts Chai for Cancer adda at her home to raise funds for underprivileged cancer patients. 125 people donated ₹4 lakh.

MUMBAI: Viji Venkatesh’s modest Thane home is bursting at the seams. Friends, family and even strangers who walk in through word of mouth, are singing, dancing, laughing raucously. The music is jaunty. A lone table groans under the weight of everything from biryani to cake, and the joy is palpable. It is cancer advocate Venkatesh’s 11th outing hosting her baby at home—the Chai for Cancer adda—which she birthed as a fundraiser campaign for underprivileged cancer patients to meet their basic necessities of food, fees and tests.

Viji Venkatesh with other donors at the Chai for Cancer gathering at her home in Thane recently. (Praful Gangurde / HT Photo)

One twenty five people showed up through the day, their personal donations adding up to ₹4 lakh, Venkatesh tells me a few days later. “Many government hospitals have amazing support programmes where patients get free medication,” she says. “But they don’t have resources such as nutrition, shelter, transport fare and money for diagnostics.”

At 72, Venkatesh is a powerhouse. As the present region head of India and South Asia at The Max Foundation, she has a 37-year professional experience in cancer patient care and support. She is also the managing trustee of the Friends of Max subsidiary she initiated 20 years ago, which today aids 18,000 cancer patients. It is the donations that this subsidiary receives which fund the Chai for Cancer addas among other cancer outreach initiatives.

Venkatesh’s journey in cancer care began in 1987 when she found her lifelong calling courtesy Y K Sapru, the founder of Cancer Patients Aid Association. Her door-to-door fundraising job took her from the plush offices of Nariman Point to the mills of Kalwa and Belapur, where workers on salaries of ₹1,200 would donate ₹25. To do something in return for their generosity, she studied cancer research books from the British Council library, and commenced tobacco awareness drives for the workers and breast self-examination workshops for their wives. She hasn’t looked back since.

Venkatesh is nursing a sore throat with endless cups of chai and struggling to speak but not a single call to her mobile goes unanswered. “It could be one of my patients,” she says. Despite an advanced glaucoma diagnosed in 2011 that left her nearly blind in one eye, she is spirited and exudes positivity. “Chai is comfort and mohabbat (love). I wanted to bring cancer into this space of normalcy. This illness has so much emotional baggage and inordinate fear,” she says, adding that for her Chai for Cancer stands for spreading knowledge, support and comradeship.

It was a $5 coffee cup bought at a cancer fundraising tea party years ago in Australia that inspired Venkatesh to launch Chai for Cancer. The cup had been sitting on her desk for years as she helped hundreds of patients navigate their daily troubles. One day, the motivational ‘Raise a toast to cancer’ quote on it suddenly hit home.

At that point, Venkatesh was aiding a 28-year-old truck driver with three little children, who had neither the time nor the money to commute to a charitable hospital in Mumbai every month. His doctor had told him to take his medicines with a glass of milk but, as he confided to Venkatesh, “I’d rather give that glass of milk to my child”. She realised then that it was easy for her to sit at a desk with cash and phone within easy reach and ask other people why they couldn’t show up for themselves.

Now about 30 addas are held annually across India everywhere, from homes, hotels and even hospitals to picnics at Delhi’s Lodhi Gardens and Kolkata’s Victoria Memorial. With successful addas in Singapore and Seattle behind her, Venkatesh is now trying to fund her way to London and Melbourne. But at the moment, Chai for Cancer spends every last rupee it gets, running on a shoestring budget with no corpus to boast of. Venkatesh dreams of a day when she has a kitty to fall back on. “But very often I feel I needn’t worry. Ordinary people have been stepping up for 10 years,” she says.

A few months ago, Venkatesh lost her husband to an aggressive cancer which claimed his life within five weeks of diagnosis. This triggered her need to share the intellectual ownership of Chai for Cancer with the next generation so that it could develop an identity strong enough to survive her. Those five weeks were also like a fresh call to arms. “I was blessed to be able to tap every resource for my husband’s treatment. It made me feel like I needed to work harder and raise more money to help more people.” Her adda goal for 2024 is a substantial ₹1.50 crore.

The next Chai for Cancer adda is being hosted by Viji Venkatesh at Taj Mahal Tea House in Bandra West from 11 am to 3 pm on May 21.