I hope that you enjoy reading this post on the weekly Friday Loose Bloggers Consortium where six of us write on the same topic. Today’s topic was chosen by yours truly. The five other bloggers who write regularly are, in alphabetical order, gaelikaa, Maxi, Paul, Shackman, and The Old Fossil. Do drop in on their blogs and see what their take is on this week’s topic. Since some of them may post late, do give some allowance for that too!
To start with, I am posting this very early in the morning as I am leaving shortly on a week-end trip with my old friend to his farm house for some male bonding and to catch up with all the news from him post his divorce and partition of assets. I shall be delayed in visiting other LBC posts and leaving my comments. Please bear with me. I shall do so immediately on return to base.
Last month when I was in Chennai, I had gone to visit an old friend Vela who has been my friend for over sixty years. He and his family are as good as my own family and for me visiting them or having them come over to my place is always a big treat. When we meet infrequently, we simply start off from where we left off the last time and the January meeting was no different. Since it was a holiday, all the children and the grand children were also there and I had a marvelous time with them and was sad to leave them in the evening.
During the latest class reunion a couple of week-ends ago, I again met with some old friends but the meetings were not of the same intensity or involvement as they were with Vela or will be with Tej the coming week end. Friendships with classmates fall into a different category and irrespective of the duration of the friendship, the closeness is of a different order all together. Pleasant nevertheless.
Compared to my friendship with other older friends my friendship with Ramesh with who I had gone to see the movie on Monday, is of recent origin but a close one nevertheless. We enjoy bantering and doing things together. Ramesh is very helpful and is forever trying to do things for me which at times can get to be irksome.
When a relatively new friend and a friend who has been a close friend for decades get to meet each other through a mutual friend, some interesting things happen as it did when Ramesh and my friend Anil met up recently in Pune. Ramesh found that he had mutual friends with Anil and the world got around soon enough with various friends of Anil asking him how come he got to meet Ramesh.
I have found another interesting thing about friends. While I have close friendships with a few, none of them have the same intense friendships with each other even when they have met thanks to me. I wonder if this is universal.
On the other hand, I know of groups of friends who have been friends from childhood who continue to be close knit friends and I envy that kind of bonding. During my recent visit to Chennai I was asking all the people that I met whether they are in touch with friends from school and all said that they were not. It is also possible that since all of us had been fairly mobile post schooling, we lost out on strong friendships of people who stayed put in one place. For instance, I have only a few very close friends like Ramesh where I now live and all my other friends live in other cities. It is odd that I have lived in Pune for twenty three years and yet have so few close friends!
I have made some very good friends thanks to the blog world in which I have met them and those also have developed over the last few years into strong bonds, but of a different kind than the bonds that I have with my real life flesh and blood friends.
Friendship is funny business alright.
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