Before an audience of New Yorkers at the National Sawdust concert-hall in a pre-pandemic world, a bearded vocalist in a black cotton kurta and complimenting pants, starts singing a composition in Raag Kirwani. “I am a vocalist and I can play the tabla to save my life,” he says, smiling, as we zoom out of this YouTube video in New Delhi, his birth-city, on a freezing January morning in 2023.

Dr Siddhartha Mukherjee, 52, saves lives, indeed, as a cancer physician, researcher and Assistant Professor of Medicine at Columbia University. But also, as a 
Pulitzer-winning author, Dr Mukherjee is the writer of four books that explain the workings of the human body—cells and genes, and cancer, the indefatigable affliction of this body.