Forever Friends

So, there was this time when I thought I should make new friends. I wasn’t trying to replace my old set of friends. I had recently started on my new job and I was learning a lot about life and I thought that your friends are the most important thing in the world. They are your wealth! After all, a man is known by the company he keeps. So, I added a few people I barely knew on social networking sites, started conversing more with people in my office & the ones I met socially in order to get to know them better. I actually made an effort to at least seem to be interested in what these people were saying or doing. Not very talkative by nature, it was a long shot.

I met a few of those people couple of times later coz they seemed to be interesting at first. Cracked a few jokes, had a few good meals, but there was something missing. The ingenuity was lacking & there was no warmth in the friendship. Maybe the only reason why me & those people kept meeting was just to kill time. Or maybe they were trying out the same thing. Slowly the interest faded, on both sides. At first, we avoided hanging out by making up excuses such as “Hey I have a family function to attend, sorry can’t make it”. Then avoiding phone calls and texting later at an ungodly hour (so you know that the person would be asleep) – “Hey just saw your message, I was driving”.

This continued for some time until the phone calls & texts stopped. Completely. Well, so this whole idea of mine had backfired, so what? I realized it was so hard to make new friends and actually expect to cultivate a friendship as adults. Its hard to come by people who are genuine & caring. Like Seinfeld said in one of his episodes, - Remember, when we were kids, and if you saw another kid with the same bicycle as yours, you would go like,”hey, you and I have matching bicycles, yey we are friends” . It was that EASY! There was an innocence in it, there was no motive behind making new friends, just pure joy. And its not like we don’t get joy out of people now, if there’s someone worthy enough we will surely give them a chance. Won’t we?

I am more than happy with my set of friends from school & college. I did make one or two really good friends after that whom I am still in touch with & who do care about me & vice versa. But I guess we shouldn’t try to control destiny. If its meant to be, it will happen. And that’s when it will be real friendship!