Good Friends

Good Friends

Posted by Amit Singh on Sunday August 06, @12:46AM

On Friendship Day this comes from the core of my heart that nostalgic temperament and its disturbing influence end in a mentally unaccompalished task

No sight is more pleasing than the message" You have got mail" when I open my mail box. A subtle smile paints onto my face and I scan through the messages in the inbox. Amongst the regular mail and ads of new products, subject of one caught my eye."Happy Friendship Day". That reminded me, today is the Friendship Day. What a wonderful day to express your feelings for your friends. The day is to be enjoyed, there are a lot of yearns to be told, old friends to be remembered, drinks to be shared but still there are some wounds to be healed.

This damn serrer is too slow,it takes painstakingly long to download a card meanwhile thoughts wonder.

Life flows like a stream, always betweeen two extremes and it carries everything along in its drift. Rocks corrode to boulder to pebbles and finally to silt. We think that its gone but its there and we are still carrying its burden. When it finally becomes unbearable we have to shed it and when we start doing so I have grown up. It may take decades, years, months or just a few moments to effactuate this change and so is the case in downloading this card.

Ah! its there. This friendship day card is from a school friend and proclaims in colourful letters "Good Friends"

"Good Friends", thats what they used to call each other. Two people in my class, belonging to different genders. He was my close friend, if I don't say closest. They too were close to each other, used to hang out together and shared a lot in common. But it was friendship and in no way romance. Same story, happens in all the schools. Then why do I write this and where do I fit into this picture?

Where is the villan to carry it forward. Here the villan is an old philosopher who branded man as a social animal. So, the social people had to solicit their unsolicited opinion everywhere. Under the rush of growing friendship came the undercurrent of stray comments and taunting remarks. "We are good friends", cliche didn't work. I had long conversations with my friend in nights and him trying his best that lest I should understand they didn't have any romantic inclinations between them. I would give him a patient hearing and convince him that I got his point, and really got it. But the next day, when I would see them together I couldn't help giving a contemptous smile. Perceiving the surrounding with your senses is easy but integrating the reality with your five ounce cerebrum is difficult.

So, as conviction of his helplessness overpowered his will to explain, he slowly started withdrawing from our circle. His point "What's the point in staying together when we don't understand each other". Our counterpoint, basically to muffle our ego, "If you give more importance to a girl than us just get lost". Candidly, I realised very well that the girl was not the cause of all this trouble, though they generally are.

tant pis, petulantly, I fired last salvo from my arsenal. I wrote a literary piece being suggestive to the extent of illustrative and coloured it with some philosophical and psychological undertones to get it a place in the school magazine. It was an instant hit, as people are always esurient for gossip. But sensation as usual is shortlived. Hostility ebbed with as days ebbed and relations got patched up. Did they really? Earlier patch used to show up but slowly it blended with the fabric. But the hem remained there.

I tried realising the root cause of all this. Was it my pusillaminous attitude or had my ego had its say I don't know. But I just told myself "Why should I feel guilty about all this ugly episode. Every one is so. I am not narrow minded or half frustu jerk in any way. If two people of opposite sex hang out together people for sure cook up stroies. What's wrong in it". Instead I tried to fix the blame on the other side for not taking the things sportingly. Little did I realise at that time that how difficult it is to digest the burden of social pressure. Time would heal all the wounds , I thought......

Now, when I have detached from that frame and gaze at it from a long distance, I can see the clear picture of things not in bits and pieces but as a complete entity. Wounds are healed but scars remain. It does not matter what hundred fools who don't understand you say about you. But if one whom you trust and who understands you and if still tells u otherwise, that's what hurts the most. There is no pain greater than being misunderstood.

Hmmnnn! it's too late for me to do anything and can't do anything but try to efface the wistful memories. But it may not be late for others.

I don't know how to end this piece. So, the moral of the story is that nostalgic temperament and its disturbing influences end in a mentally unaccomplished task