Friends

Friendship day has already passed and I am a bit late with this blog. But, better late than never. There is hardly anything left untold about the value of friendship and friends in our life. But let me make ourselves aware of 2-3 aspects.

In the domain of spiritualism, selflessness is held Supreme. It is called the tunnel that leads us to the Ultimate Truth. Friendship epitomizes selflessness in the simplest way. In a way we can notice and practice every day even unconsciously. One need not have to master tomes on spiritualism to have friends after all. But my definition of "friend" is the classic old book definition and not the hundreds and thousands we have on our social networking sites.

Human being is a social animal and he is bound to have relations. All relationships, save friendship, come with bonds- some small and other big. Mother, father, sister, brother, in-laws, husband, wife, son, daughter, boss... all come with bonds. There is a set of basic duties that one has to deliver to all these relationships. They are tagged responsibilities and duties. I don't mean that these duties are carried out half-heartedly by all of us. We deliver these whole-heartedly and pleasantly, but still they are our duties.

But friendship probably is the only relationship that we get to choose and hence there is no bond here. Spending time with your friend, having a hearty laugh with him are not duties. You do these selflessly. You don't get any material benefits by being with our friends. But it all feeds to our souls' wellbeing. Lord Krishna too calls Sakhya Bhakti as His best form of worship (treating God as our friend).

Dedicated to all my loving friends.

FB

Early this week, I read an article in a daily (yes, there are people who still read news in print). It was authored by an elderly gentleman who wrote about his experience using Facebook. He made the usual points of how he met his long forgotten nephews and nieces and also how it was eating into his time.

But the point that attracted my attention was how he usually ended up having negative emotions at the end of each session. He said he felt less important, less happy and less successful. Even this comment is trite, but I liked the simplicity with which he had narrated. The point, he continued, that was missed was that we compare people’s fb activity with our actual life. Look how happy my friend is with his wife; look at that broad grin and those tight hugs and then see here what a mess my wife has made of my life. Look how my cousin is in a high paying job- new car and all those jungle resort photos and then this miserable life over here, working over weekends for peanuts. Just enough to put you down for the whole day.

But if we look a little deeper, we will realize that what appears in fb is how they want others to see them and not how it is actually going for them. Don’t we do similar things? If we were to listen to the stories behind those smiles and hugs, you would not trade a minute of your life for their year. If we count our blessings, life as is, is just perfect. Every person has his highs and his lows and it is grave injustice if we compare other’s highs with our lows without also comparing the remainder combination.

How can we rate our quality of life with the number of ‘likes’ and the type of ‘comments’ we receive? Life existed just as fine even before fb and it will exist just fine even after it.