Imagine this… a 5 year old boy who was cute as a button… a 5 year old girl who wanted to be friends with him. Now this is not an easy set of circumstances considering the age. Then came the day to celebrate rakhi in school as all good Indian schools do, and the boys and girls of Sr. Kindergarten (Div. E) were made to line up in pairing rows. The girls were told to tie their threads to the boy in front of them.
Above mentioned boy jumps the line to stand in front of the girl and she can’t believe her luck. What better way to break the ice! So she dutifully tied the rakhi to this boy and proclaimed him her brother.
Today, 24 years later, Jo and I are still the best of friends. I still tie him a rakhi and he is the best brother a girl could ever ask for. We have gone through everything together, classmates through school, we parted for college, but came back to do our post graduation in the same institute.
Called the ‘Siamese twins’ we did everything together, there was really no space for anyone else. This didn’t stop us from having other friends… but nothing comes close to what we share. Even though we now live in different cities, we still think of the same things at the same time and complete each others sentences.
Though Jo is my oldest and dearest friend, he is by no means alone. Some of my other friends and I have been together for 23 years, 20 years, 15 years… and it gets progressive. At each stage of my life, every where I went (school, college, post-grad, AIESEC) I have had the good fortune to find very good friends. The most recent being 6 months ago.
What is interesting is that having made all these friends at different ages, means that the kind of relationship I share with each of them is also very different. I remember discussing this with a relatively newer friend.
With older friends, things are somewhat easy. They know you inside out and have been around when everything happened in your life. But then that also means taking each other for granted and becoming insecure and intolerant about any changes. Also in a lot of cases you tend to drift apart and lose touch with each other.
Newer friends accept you for what you are. There aren’t too many inflated expectations there. It is a very accommodating set of circumstances. But how do you open your heart out completely to them also?
The dynamics are also different. Time spent with older friends is full of reminiscence, of tracking plans, of updating ideologies. With the newer bunch it is all about discovery, having new thoughts, and sharing new experiences.
Then there is an entirely different concept of friends. Those who you may never meet, or may meet very infrequently, but who you will communicate with as a regular part of your life. Here the absence of communication actually leaves a void in your day. Whether it’s chatting with a stranger, or reading and commenting on each other’s blogs.
It’s not by accident that I consider friends a very crucial part of my pentagram. I guess what I am trying to say is that I am very grateful for the wonderful people in my life who I have the good fortune of calling friends. All of you reading this know who you are; so, thank you!
7 comments:
"The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances...
That really is a nice saying, thanks Maria...
The 'rakhi' ruse has always been an excuse... but I have been lucky, I am still very close to 4 of my 'adoptive' brothers and still tie them rakhis.
Thanks for nice comments... Cheers!
hey nice piece...come rakhi time we used to run for our lives and go into hiding coz all the hot girls thought going around and tying rakhis was the best way to counter unwanted guy attention...:-P
very refreshing! especially since this morning [for some odd reason] I was thinking about this old friend of mine, who was my bench mate..
I was pondering on why I stopped talking to her.. cos she teased me by calling me Aunty! Aunty! [u see, my name ended in 'anti' which even forced me to go change it to 'anthi'].. well the fact that this was triggered because I called her 'Tea! Tea!' [her name was Arundhati] is completely unbased.
friends are the coolest. my version of "the old faithful" at
http://funnycide.blogspot.com/2005/02/old-faithful.html
childhood and rakhis--always wondered what the deal was though, moms insisting dotters promptly tie rakhis to boy we played/went out with? their own safety-net perhaps? knew a pal who promptly tied rakhis to guys she met that strangely seemd to be this "ooh you my brother now so behave" :-))) well i guess the rakhi ruse came outta not being able to name a relationship between a guy and a gal!
and reminds me of this couple-a- folk at college that in year one, had a rakhi relationship. Year two saw happy yellow roses on friendship day and man, year three was the epitomization of feb 14th :-))
nice blog btw! and yep, friends are the coolest!
Immie...
Nice analysis there!!
:-)))
nice one inmyeye ! made me very very nostalgic of my college days !
inmyeye, this was the first blog i have ever read. Nothing better could have happened, I really understood what you mean...
As someone said "A friend is a person who would feel sorry for you if you are in jail, but a true friend would say 'It was fun'"...
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