bell hooks, my friend
bell hooks is no more.
thank you, my friend, for being the friend you have been to this stranger all these days!
yes, bell hooks is a friend though I haven’t met her even once.
It was in the summer of 2019 that I finally picked up the book All About Love after it being there in my personal library for nearly three years then. while reading it I was so deeply touched by every sentence that I just wanted to pick several expressions, phrases, sentences, and passages from the book, hold them by their hand, and kiss them! by centering politics and life around the idea and practice of love and stressing on ‘love ethic’, bell hooks theoretically and intellectually concretized for me a worldview which until then was unconsciously being formed in the same direction under the influence of the words of Shailendar, Paulo Freire, Basavanna, Kabir, Gibran etc.
after reading her All About Love, i quickly picked up Salvation, her second book in the four-book series on love. it made it possible for me to view the world in a very different way since it dealt with black people and love. while reading it, i was constantly engaged with the thought of how one could view the Indian marginalized sections from a similar lens of love. it only humbled me and widened my horizon and made my heart even more tender.
next, i picked up her The Will To Change, and, no exaggeration, while reading this book it did not feel like reading a book. i never thought i would weep reading a non-fiction book, but while reading The Will to Change i wept endlessly like a child, like weeping in therapy sessions. it certainly was therapeutic to an extent. The Will to Change deals with ‘men. masculinity and love’ and it addresses with great depth and more importantly with great compassion and kindness, the pressure of patriarchy on men; an issue that i have been trying to articulate for a long period of time. reading this book, as said earlier, did not feel like reading a book. it felt like making a new friend who heard the silence between my heartbeats, the unvoiced cries within me, and then just put her arms on my shoulder and silently said, “I understand you.”
my friend, your books Communion and Where We Stand remain half-read and stare at me from my bookshelf. there are many more books of yours, my friend, that i wish to read and I will certainly read them and keep you alive in my living of life and in my whole-hearted attempt to practice of love ethic.
bell hooks, my friend, you are the only author other than Galeano whose hand I wished to kiss. it will never be possible. but your arms will always be around my shoulder and in its warmth, I will feel more and more grounded. thank you for being yourself, my friend.
rest in love, bell hooks.
Crazy Mind's Eye 
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