In his deeply personal first book, media professional and cancer survivor Saurabh Tyagi looks beyond illness to explore faith, family, resilience, relationships and purpose—and how life’s darkest moments can completely transform our understanding of what truly matters.
Mumbai: Sometimes life changes gradually. At other times, it changes with a diagnosis. For Saurabh Tyagi, November 2019 became the dividing line between the life he knew and the life he would have to rediscover. After nearly two decades of building a successful career across India’s media and marketing industry, cancer suddenly changed his relationship with his body, profession, people around him and, ultimately, life itself.
Tyagi has now documented that extraordinary journey in his first book, The World Tilted: A True Human Story — A Memoir of Cancer, Faith and a Second Life. But this is not simply a story about cancer. At its heart is a deeply human and spiritual exploration of what remains when health becomes uncertain, professional identity loses its importance and relationships are tested by adversity.
The book follows Tyagi through three major surgeries, radiotherapy and the difficult process of rebuilding his body and confidence. He had to relearn basic aspects of everyday life, including eating, speaking and smiling. Yet alongside this medical journey runs another, quieter story—his relationship with Neem Karoli Baba, or Maharaj Ji, which began years before cancer entered his life.
Tyagi’s spiritual connection took shape in 2011, when a copy of Ram Dass’s Miracle of Love came into his hands during a night at a Delhi hospital where a family member was dying. In January 2016, he visited Kainchi Dham, Neem Karoli Baba’s ashram in Uttarakhand, for the first time. He describes the experience not simply as discovering a spiritual place, but as a strange sense of recognition.
Years later, that faith would accompany him into one of the most frightening moments of his life. During an operation in 2022, a surgical complication left Tyagi conscious and terrified. With control slipping away, his prayer became one of complete surrender: “Either take me, Baba, or relieve me of this trauma.”
It is here that The World Tilted moves beyond a conventional story of illness and recovery. Tyagi does not present faith as an alternative to medicine, nor does he attempt to prove supernatural experiences. Doctors, surgeries, radiotherapy and medical care remain fundamental to his survival. Faith becomes something different: a source of strength when certainty disappears.
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As Tyagi writes in his Author’s Note, “This book is not an attempt to prove miracles. It is an attempt to honour the moments that changed me.”
One such moment comes in 2026, when he returns to Kainchi Dham for the first time since his illness began. Tyagi describes encountering a traffic constable who unexpectedly helped his family navigate an impossibly long queue, only to become untraceable afterwards. Whether it was coincidence, the kindness of a stranger or what a devotee might understand as grace, Tyagi deliberately leaves the answer to the reader.
For Go Spiritual News Magazine & App, that restraint makes the spiritual dimension of his story especially meaningful. Faith does not always need to explain what happened. Sometimes its importance lies in how an experience changes us.
Perhaps the most universally relatable part of the memoir, however, is not about illness or miracles. It is about people.
Cancer revealed to Tyagi the uncomfortable difference between genuine relationships and relationships built around usefulness. A successful professional life can produce hundreds of contacts, meetings, invitations and apparently close associations. But when health deteriorates and professional influence temporarily disappears, the nature of those connections can become painfully clear.
Tyagi writes about relationships moving between transactions and genuine human bonds. Some people who once appeared close quietly disappeared when he no longer had anything professionally useful to offer. Others remained without being asked.
He captures the experience in a striking observation: “The strange part isn’t that people leave. That’s almost expected. The strange part is how much you can respect someone for staying, once you’ve watched enough people go.”
There is a profound spiritual lesson in that realization. Success often tells us how many people know us. Suffering can reveal how many people truly care for us.
The book consequently becomes as much about gratitude as loss. Family, a small circle of genuine friends, doctors, mentors and those who remained beside Tyagi acquire greater significance after he experiences how quickly circumstances can change.
His illness also transformed his understanding of professional success. Titles, networks, targets and positions had naturally occupied an important place during his career. After cancer, survival and recovery introduced a different measurement of achievement. Family mattered more. Time mattered more. Contribution mattered more. Being alive itself acquired a meaning that everyday routine can easily make us forget.
That may be the strongest spiritual message of The World Tilted: a second life does not necessarily mean being given another life; sometimes it means learning to see the same life differently.
Tyagi says writing the book became part of his healing and that he “healed a little with every page.” His hope is that the memoir reaches someone sitting in a hospital waiting room, facing a frightening diagnosis, rebuilding after a personal crisis or simply needing a reason to believe that life can begin again.
For Go Spiritual, Tyagi’s journey is a reminder that spirituality is not only found in temples, scriptures or meditation. Sometimes it appears beside a hospital bed, through a doctor’s commitment, in a family’s presence, in a friend who refuses to disappear or in the faith that helps someone survive another difficult night.
Saurabh Tyagi is a media and marketing professional, entrepreneur and cancer survivor with more than 25 years of experience. He has worked with leading media organisations including The Times of India and Amar Ujala across print, digital, outdoor media, advertising, branded content and brand strategy. He currently serves as Chief Marketing Officer at Deepspatial, a Geo AI company working across areas including education, healthcare, agriculture and disaster management. After cancer transformed his perspective on life and work, Tyagi says he now measures his journey more by contribution than position. The World Tilted is his first book and is available on Kindle.
