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Tuesday, October 04, 2005

Chp 45. Friend "ship"

Semester vacation in progress. Leisure at its best. I can’t believe I haven’t blogged anything for more than a month!

The past one month has been very hectic and tiring for me, both physically and emotionally. Our end terms were coming up, and that means loads and loads of project reports, submissions and presentations. There wasn’t any time at all to mug for the end-terms. In addition to this, all my closest frens left for their exchange program, making my life even sadder.

Monu, Amra and Girish were the first to leave me. We dropped them at the airport late in the night even though I had a big ManComm submission the next day. I stayed up that whole night completing my assignment. Didn’t go to class the next morning and all the profs later wanted to meet me and know why I didn’t come to class. It sux being so obvious in class, even though I am the most silent one during class discussion. After that it was Shubha, and I had a test the next morning so I couldn’t see her off. Later Tommy was next and Amol n I dropped him at the airport. From then onwards, it was just Amol and me. Amol who was supposed to join his Copenhagen University a long time ago had some minor problems with his visa. But that didn’t last long, and on the eve of my exam week, Ankita and I went and dropped him. Man, it was a sad scene indeed which as a guy I wouldn’t wanna talk about in public.

Life really becomes one big vessel of emptiness without frens around. Even if you don’t hang out at places or have dinner together, the mere presence of frens by your side gives you a deep sense of togetherness. After I repeated my first year here, I thought things won’t be much different from last year. Oh how wrong I was. One semester has come and gone, and yet I hardly know my current batchmates. Last year, by this time, I was very close to many people already.

What constitutes friendship? What gives a person a membership rights to that exclusive circle of trust? (And why am I sounding like SJP? Guess I’ve been watching too many Sex and the City) Having common interests and similar wave-length are just a few of the factors that lay down the foundation for an ever-lasting friendship. What really brings about people close to each other is the number of times they end up hanging out with each other. Right from playing one quick game of pool together after dinner to designing birthday charts together, all these small small things add up to one huge bonding of mutual trust.

25 years of age now, I feel I am quite old enough to look back at life and analyze what brings people close to each other. The first thing people talk about their group is that, they all have common interests. I feel that is too big a term to use. Because when I look back at my life and ponder, all the people I’ve grown close to are very different from me. Back in Engg College, my circle of frens had completely different taste in music from mine. They weren’t into dating and romancing as I was. Even here in IIMB too, my personal interests are very different from my frens’. Yet there is something there, a very mysterious and unseen entity that pulls us all together. In Engg College Paolo, Johny, Thomas, Jacob etc were all mallus, Varasidhi was tam, Abhishek was marwari. I thought I was clicking well only with Southies due to my South-Indian upbringing, until I started having north Indian frens. My ex-girlfren of 2 yrs was also a Rajasthani. And then there were Clement, Elezar, Jabo etc, my very very close frens from Rwanda. After that it was Hyderabad, living with Arabs. Hyder, Haj, Alaa, Amoudi etc became my blood brothers. And here in IIMB, Tommy is bhong, Amol mumbaite, Monu tam, Kata is gult etc etc. At one point I even thought diversity has a role to play in all these. But then, this year, I found a lot of new mizo frens who had very similar interests as mine, leave alone similar background.

Looking back at all this now, I realized there is one very important factor that pulls people close to each other – it’s not the diversity nor the similarity in background. Just one very important criterion – The Same Sense of Humor.

The more we laugh out to each other’s jokes, the more we become closer subconsciously. With closeness comes trust. Ask yourself this, don’t you suddenly have this unexplainable attraction/closeness to someone who can make you laugh when you least expect it, and who genuinely laughs at your jokes too? The Power of Laughter is greater than you ever think it was. It’s like the Vanguard of an army set out to conquer frens. It never fails.

I miss my frens. And at the same time, I must take more effort to get to know this new batch. No man is an island, and even if I am, then I must build more harbors for other ships to dock and at the same time send out my vessels to other ports. friend-Ship Ahoy, mate!