Friend Vs. 'Friend'

          Randomly thinking about the fleeting events and encounters that transpire in our day to day lives, I couldn't help but spend more than just a few minutes introspecting and weighing the evolutionary changes that have occurred to the concept of a word that held a world of meaning until a decade and a half ago…‘Friend’.

          The term appears to have evolved through the times. With the arrival of
the social networking wagon with its online and offline compartments, stopping at every station of our tangled existences we have been witnessing a global phenomenon which could be branded as ‘the friendship explosion’. The ever-increasing number of ‘friends’ who populate the ever-expanding ‘friend-lists’ of the young and the old alike in the various social networking websites and smartphone messaging apps that we see all around us, as well as within us, bears testimony to this fact.

          I am no exception to this ‘marvel-of-life’ and it continues to amaze me, and sometimes startle me that I’m friends with hundreds and hundreds of people whose lives happened to have intersected with mine at some point in time.

          Destiny, now powered by social networking services brings together people for reasons they themselves can never fathom. However, in the middle of all this complexity there still exist friendships that last a lifetime, amidst the vast majority of friendships that wilt and wither on the way. Sometimes in life friendships assume the form and flavours of a bowl of toss-up salad. You might get the cool cucumber, the red hot chili pepper, the bitter melon, the weepy onion, the sweet beet & sometimes the sour lime, or maybe even everything together! Or if lucky, you could be blessed with the company of the flavorsome olive oil, that blends together the sweetness, the saltiness & the bitterness, helping the group attain the necessary unity. And sometimes you can’t thank social networking apps enough for keeping the salad bowl intact even when the Cucumber happens to be in South Africa, the melon in Ceylon & the Olive oil in Kodambakkam.

          Humans have always possessed a basic instinct to collect things. There are people who collect to preserve their bygone memories, while there are others who collect to fulfill personal tastes. We now live in a world where people collect people for reasons strange and many. We never know if we’ll discover from amongst this collection a mentor, a mum, a sister, a nightmare, an alter ego, a partner in crime, a creep, a soul mate or a best friend! Like Forrest Gump’s momma said, "Life was like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're gonna get." Or perhaps like Rowling's very own box of ‘Bertie Bott's Every Flavour Beans’… "a risk with every mouthful!" ;)

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