Friendship.


I went to my brother's school recently for the 'Christmas Celebrations' event organised by the school. It was nothing more than a godforsaken mela with  loud speakers which deafeningly played songs like jalebi bai and such, many small jhulas and kiosks selling stuff from chat, domino's pizza, ice creams to Tupperware(for what reason would anyone go to a school to buy such stuff is beyond me).


Anyways, the post is not about that. When we were there, my brother who is in second standard, came running and panting, just chased by a boy of his class. He told us(me and my mom) that the boy studies in his class and was his friend. Though they were just playing, my mind suddenly skipped to a day somewhere in the past month when he came home teary eyed and on inquiring told us that some of his friends from class kept teasing him all the time and pushed him to the ground that day. I told him that boys who steal from his bag and made fun of him were not friends. But for him perhaps, all the kids he knew were his friends..

Friends or rather friendship is a queer thing. It could be the simplest thing in the world, and at times it could baffle anyone by the complexity it possesses with all the webs bound by us. Since I sat down to write about it, here are some of the stages in our life of friendship.

We were kids: Like my brother, when we were kids, every body we knew in our age group was our friend. I didn't matter if our friend was a boy or a girl. They were called just friends.

We went to school: When we were in middle school, we had two sets of friends. Those at school with whom we shared our lunch and played football or basketball whenever we got chance.. before prayers.. in breaks..in free periods.. after school. And those near home with whom we played carom or cricket and watched cartoons. Mostly then too girl and boyfriends were differentiated.

High School: Now, we had designated groups for friendship. In class, in our locality and even among cousins sometimes. And now, if you were a boy, you'd have to choose and specify whether a girl is your sister, friend or girlfriend and vice-versa in the case of girls. A new player came into the field at this stage. It was called 'ego', and it had a large share of say when it came to friendship and relationships in general.

We grew up: This includes all those who are in their late teens and twenties.

Most of us now have many friends, some of us have friends outside facebook too. We have an elder and much intense version of ego that we foolishly call self-respect sometimes. And intentionally or otherwise we have, by now, divided our friends into best, close, 'not very close' and 'do i know you' categories. There are maybe more 1000 categories as seen in a telecom advertisement. 

We perhaps, have a lot of secrets now and  had to resort to a situation where you can't tell every friend everything or share your stuff with everybody. Hence, we do what turns out to be one of the main factors why our friends are seen as best, close and not so close.... Selective sharing.


Lastly, I personally think, any friend which I could count as zaruri is either not my friend or deserve someone better than me who doesn't count him/her as an obligation. 
I wish I could bring all the innocence of my childhood friendship to this day, but that is just a wish!

P.S: I wish to thank Ashna Banga for her blog post, after reading which I wrote this thing with just my limited vocabulary and lesser use of 'Backspace'.  ; )


Comments

  1. Heyy.. I had no idea you thought about what I wrote and worked on it!! But needless to say, your post came out pretty good. It's simple, with 'flowing-in-a-go' thought thread that makes it easy to read and sound "real". :)

    I agree with your thoughts. While reading I could see all my friends in my mind- the childhood ones, where everyone was everyone's friend. Then came the segregation- the neighborhood friends, school friends. Now it's facebook friends and 'real' friends. Aptly described.
    But also, I guess it's something related to the sphere of life we are in. As kids, there's only school, then there's a bit of socializing where we segregate people. But yeah, we do desire to live the way we did as kids! :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Off course, your article was indeed a thought provoking one... and so I decided to write personal blog posts without doing the write-delete-write exercise much.

    About the article, to tell you the truth... i started to write about something entirely different and ended up writing this instead.
    Anyways, thanks you wrote a feedback... it means a lot!!! :)

    ReplyDelete

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