Bon voyage with Friend(s on a )Ship called life

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.