Jeremy and I shared only a brief crossing of paths during his visit to India, at a time when neither of us could have known how lasting that encounter would become. Some meetings are measured in hours. Others are measured in what they leave behind. Jeremy belongs to the second kind.
What struck me most was not any single thing he said, but the wholeness of who he was — the rare coherence between what a person believes, how they speak, and how they live. Jeremy carried his philosophy not as an intellectual accessory, but as something lived, breathed, and quietly offered to everyone around him.
We found each other through literature — through the writings of India’s freedom fighters, those who chose the weight of an idea over the comfort of survival. I still carry the quiet humility of that moment when I realized Jeremy knew more about Bhagat Singh’s writings than I did. It was not just knowledge. It was reverence. That moment became a mirror for me, reflecting how casually we sometimes walk past the depth in our own inheritance.
From there, our conversations expanded without boundary — Marx, Mao, ideology, history, the uncomfortable architecture of the world we inhabit. We spoke about veganism, about the discipline of aligning one’s choices with one’s conscience, something I have wrestled with honestly. We were both atheists, and I had long carried a private fear — that in some moment of darkness or desperation, I might retreat into prayer not out of conviction, but out of weakness.
Jeremy dissolved that fear.
He brought me back to Bhagat Singh — to the essay Why I Am An Atheist, written not from a place of ease, but from a prison cell, days before execution. Bhagat Singh’s atheism did not crack under pressure. It deepened. Jeremy helped me understand that a belief worth holding is not one that survives only in comfort — it is one that becomes clearer in the dark. He did not preach this. He simply embodied it, and that was more powerful than any sermon.
Since neither of us believed in heaven or hell, we both understood — perhaps more urgently than most — that this is it. This life. This conversation. This moment of genuine connection between two people trying to live with honesty. Meaning is not waiting somewhere beyond. It must be built here, on the ground, with both hands.
Jeremy built it beautifully.
His courage to think freely, question without fear, and extend genuine care across borders of culture and belief is not something that dies with a person. It transfers. It lives now in those he changed — and he changed me, in ways I am still discovering.
You will be deeply, profoundly missed.
To Jeremy’s family and loved ones — grief this heavy has no words that can carry it. But know this: he reached across the world and left something permanent in the people he met. His ideas are still traveling. His questions are still being asked. That is not a small thing. That is a kind of immortality — the only kind that is real.
May the love you gave each other be the ground you stand on now.
-Rajiv Kumar
