Pujit Aggarwal Redivivus - Friendship


The moment you are born, the auspicious event instantly creates several ad hoc relative identities. Your entry into the world has given birth to mother, father, brother, sister, uncle, aunt, grandpa, granny, and any number of cousins. All of them welcome you to their fold. You are a bonny, mettlesome baby. The world is your oyster.

Joining the pre-school and subsequently the school, you will discover the comforting equipage of classmates and playmates some of whom you will, for lack of a better word, miscall friends. They are fellow travellers and fellow sufferers under the back-breaking weight of the school bag you lug all the way to school and home.

 No sooner do you upgrade from one class to another, than the equation changes. The old familiar faces scatter to the periphery, giving way to new classmates sitting next to you. Some are left behind and some now occupy the front row, basking in the supportive nimbus of the teacher on the dais. With a little bit of luck, one or two of them will remain close enough over the years to become your trustworthy friends, regardless of ups and downs on both sides.

A friend is a present you give yourself. Serendipity is the patron goddess of the bond. You cannot scout for a friend on facebook, twitter, social media, ads, firefox, google or any other search engine.

A true-blue friend invests in you without any expectation of dividends or accrual of a bumper bonanza from a long-term deposit. He is tacitly committed to your welfare. He does not advertise his concern on the billboard with neon lights. When the share-holders and stake-holders reward your speech with a standing ovation, he is the one who nudges his girlfriend in the rib and winks mischievously at his mother-in-law. He is a sport extraordinaire, with a solid character to boot. Such staunch friends are rare in the rat race of you-scratch-my-back-I-scratch-yours.

It may have started as a thin filament of tentative affinity: friendship is a rope you weave with stout strands from both sides. When you have interwoven it tight, both of you walk on the tight rope holding hands without losing your balance. It is a tensile rope woven skillfully by imperishable friendship. Either you, or he, or both, may overbalance and fall, but he does not let go of your hand. The two of you are so inextricably intertwined you might as will risk it.

Maybe our safeties come for the risks we take.
Do you want to pay the highest, the noblest compliment to someone you cherish immeasurably? Bestow on him or her the polyvalent honorific of friend rather than what passes as a noun in a biological or working mashup.

Once you have reached the threshold of youth, you need echt friends to instruct and entertain you. Endearments and interdictions from parents, guardians, and bosses become repetitious boilerplate bromides you have become conditioned to ignore over the years. Beware of the ersatz. Learn to differentiate it from the echt.

In the temple of friendship, there is no glare of spotlights to magnify the splendour of the décor. On the contrary, its subdued luminosity evokes the holy hush radiating from the single candle at the altar flickering with a lambent flame.






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