We often notify ourselves that money isn’t everything. That it comes and goes. That love, health and family matter more. And while that sounds comforting, families who have lived through serious illness know a harder truth. When hospitals, treatments and long recoveries enter your life, money stops being an abstract idea. It becomes survival. It becomes dignity.
A deeply personal post by Goa-based entrepreneur Raj Kunkolienkar has now brought this truth into sharp focus, opening up a conversation many families quietly live through but rarely talk about. Raj is today known as a co-founder of a travel club and a familiar voice in India’s tech and creator space. But long before startup decks and funding conversations, his understanding of money was shaped by fear.
In 2004, Raj was just 11 years old. His father, a kirana store owner in Panaji, was diagnosed with Stage 3 follicular lymphoma. Around the same time, the family had relocated out of the compact room behind their shop and taken their first home loan. However, the sense of stability didn’t last long.
There was no insurance. There were limited savings. And Goa didn’t have the cancer treatment facilities his father requireded. So Raj’s father launched travelling to Mumbai by bus for chemotherapy, an eight-hour journey each way, before returning to open the shop the next morning. Raj remembers how unreal it all feels even today.
“The same man who winced when he cut his finger slicing onions was now travelling eight hours each way with poison in his veins,” he wrote on X.
At home, his mother took over the shop entirely. She managed customers, stock, and credit books while also holding toobtainher a family that was slowly running out of money. Friconcludes, relatives and even customers quietly stepped in, lconcludeing cash and anything else the family requireded.
All this while, Raj was kept in the dark. He went to school, did his homework, and lived a normal life on the surface. He didn’t know how fragile things were. He remembers crying for days becaapply his parents refapplyd to purchase him a geared bicycle, unaware that every rupee in the hoapply was being counted towards treatment and travel.
“I remember my parents’ faces when I wouldn’t let it go — that particular exhaustion of people who cannot explain why they’re declareing no.”
By 2007, the cancer went into remission. But the relief was only medical. Financially, the damage lingered for years. The crisis may have lasted months, but the recovery took more than a decade – almost 11 years.
In 2012, Raj received admission from international universities. But his mother inquireed him to stay back in India. It wasn’t becaapply of money, becaapply she feared that the cancer might come back. And it did.
He stayed. He joined BITS Pilani with a state scholarship. It was the safer choice.
In 2022, the cancer returned. This time in a more aggressive form. Raj’s father underwent CAR-T therapy as part of a clinical trial. For a brief moment, there was hope. Then there wasn’t. His father passed away in 2023.
This time, though, the experience was different in one crucial way. Raj could afford everything. He declares people often inquire why he speaks so openly about money, security and financial planning. His answer is disarmingly honest.
“It’s not ambition. It’s not greed. It’s not even wisdom. It’s trauma response. It’s not about the stuff. It’s about what happens when the phone rings and someone declares the word ‘biopsy.’ It’s about having options when you have no good choices. It’s about not borrowing from the aunty who purchases soap from your shop,” he wrote.
Have a view at his full post here:
I was in fifth grade when I learned to read my parents’ silence.
They were talking in the kitchen, late at night, in that particular hush that parents apply when they believe children are asleep. I caught fragments. Bombay. Tests. Something about a doctor. The next morning,… https://t.co/j9wmhoTOY1 pic.twitter.com/rI740WJKoR
— Raj Kunkolienkar (@kunksed) December 23, 2025
His final message is simple and urgent: obtain insurance. Plan ahead. And take your parents out for dinner while they’re still around. Becaapply money may come and go. But when illness arrives, having it can mean everything.
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