To start with history: Wiki
page says that Friendship Day was originally promoted by Joyce Hall, the
founder of Hallmark Card in 1930 with the intention of promoting the greetings
card sharing on the occasion of this day! Bingo!
So the very beginning of marking a day as dedicated to
friend was purely a marketing strategy, taking little advantage of human
emotion in making and sustaining friends, nothing else.
Many people ask do we really need a special day to celebrate
friendship with our friends. Well I feel, it is your choice. You make it
special or you don’t, end of the day your friends will remain your friends and
your present enemies can be your future friends and your future friend will
join you somewhere in your upcoming lifeline.
In this age of Watsapp, Facebook, Skype and other so called
social networking sites, we have 250 friends in Facebook, 100 contacts is Watsapp
chat, 10 groups from your college/school/university/workplace etc. However have
you ever asked this question which I often ask myself?
·
If this is 11 O’clock in midnight, you had a bad
day or you are in bad mood or you are messed up. You can’t speak with your
parents as they must be sleeping, you can’t dial your cousins as they will ask
lots of explanation and you don’t want to talk about this. So you need somebody
whom you can dial and talk for hours, nothing but gibberish, to feel little
better.
How many people you can actually call at that point of time for whom
who don’t need to think what can be the topic?
Well I see if for one
day I am in this situation and at the same time I have no internet
connectivity- so no chat service, I can dial only a few numbers from my phone.
These are the people whom I do not say ‘hi’ everyday online, still whenever I
need them I can send messages or call or just thinking about the time I spent
with them brings a piece of smile on my face.
So the definition of
friendship is different for different friends. All are special in their own
space. All deserves a hug and smile.
I can touch my childhood when I spend time with my school friends.
I am allowed to feel or behave like ‘still an innocent child’ with them. When
we sit in a coffee shop or a restaurant, waiters will look at us with a shock
of lifetime. We laugh out loud, crack jokes on ourselves, and remember our
strict Sanskrit teacher or beautiful English teacher or the day we stood on the
bench when whole class was unable to answer the History question. These things
do not embarrass me when I am with them. As we have seen each other in our
ugliest days when we lost our first baby tooth, and crying faces when the class
teacher scolded the class for making noise in last period, and humiliating days
when I failed to write correct spelling of Ramayana on the black board. We have
had time like when we lost connection with each other as after school neither
any of us had social networking sites to get connected nor we had the mobile phones. But
still we feel most comfortable with each other at any moment. We got different
jobs, we stay in different cities, we work in different shifts. But nothing can
change the constant celebration of our friendship.
Then here come the college friends. College life is at such
a juncture of life where you are yet to be completely out of your childhood minimalisms
and yet a complicated adolescent is waiting for you. In 8 semesters, we made friends,
we had been ragged by seniors and have ragged the juniors, have done group
studies together, have bunked classes, have taken and shared notes before
exams, have queued at the Xerox machine to take multiple copies for ourselves
and friends, have shared the tiffin, had crush and affection on some of them,
had suppressed competition with few others, had waited over University-website
on the day of semester results, had nurtured high hopes to shine in life
someday and had said good bye to many after we had done with final year. It was
an incredible journey from a naïve science student to an engineering student,
then a bunch of people whom had great time in those 4 years - seeing them
getting placed in different companies and finally spreading across different
cities of India. My amazing group of kitty party-most of them is connected
virtually but still they are the best gift I have got from college. Now most of
us are married, and most of us are in same occupation. So we share recipes and resumes,
secrets and gossips, style and smile!
Then we have friends from work - places. Well it is pretty
much dynamic as you keep on changing employer. We spend almost 8 to 9 hours a
day in office and may be more than we spend with anybody in our life. So possibly
this timing statistics makes friends and what we call ‘network’ in corporate
terms. You will have very few handfuls of friends here who will support you in
your toughest day at work and fewer of them who will be very happy on your success.
So they will always remain special.
Apart from these 3 sources, we do meet people , we do greet
people, we do make friends. There are a large number of known faces, who
appreciates when we do something nice, who criticizes if we make mistakes, who
call you suddenly one day just to say ‘how are you?’ and we feel so warm, who
wishes luck for ventures. I remember all of them when I utter the word ‘friend’.
I was watching a documentary that day. A person was saying, “Being
loved by somebody gives us the feeling of safety. In ancient times, when a
community used to rebuke a person out of tribe, his safety used to be at stake.
And we inherit the same feeling till now. So when somebody makes us their friend
or shows us that they care for us, we feel safe. We feel comfortable”. What
could have been a better description of the word friendship than this?
Happy Friendship Day to all the friends whom I care for.
