Skip to main content

Friends



Had it not been for a couple of messages I received, I would not have known that today was Friendship Day.  One of the messages said, “Happy friendship day to the most fantastic friend.  Thanx for being my frd sir...”  It came from a past student.  I found it both amusing and encouraging.  Amusing, because the sender of that message is 36 years younger than me.  Encouraging, because I believe the best teacher is a friend to his/her students especially if the students are adolescents. 

Teaching adolescents is fun.  Because they teach me more than I teach them.  Also because I think I’m an adolescent at heart.  In fact, a few months back one of my present students remarked that in the class.  And I laughed nodding in agreement.

Adolescents are excellent friends.  In fact, their loyalty in friendship has no parallel in any other period of human growth and development.  Every parent who is struggling to deal with an adolescent son or daughter can take this counsel: be a good friend to your offspring and 90% of problems will vanish.

My observation is that the adults ruin the adolescents with their mood swings, demands that don’t understand the quintessential adolescent rebelliousness, and – worst of all – adult politics.  There’s nobody on the earth who understands candidness better than the adolescents. 

This does not mean that adolescents can be entrusted to themselves entirely.  Not at all; they need ‘good’ friends.  And that’s just what they need.


Happy friendship day to all my adult readers, especially those who have adolescent children. 
Labels:

Comments

  1. AnonymousAugust 3, 2014 at 7:34 PM

    Happy friendship days to you too.....it is so good to find some fondness and affinity in blogging community

    ReplyDelete
  2. Nima DasAugust 3, 2014 at 8:00 PM

    I too share your views about teens. Being a friend is the best way . I too teach teenagers. and this is my take on them too.The best time of the day is when i am with my young students inside the class,telling them stories from the past,talking and interacting with them.i forget all my woes and physical pains and aches when i am with them.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalAugust 3, 2014 at 9:20 PM

      It's a challenge too, Nima, I'm sure you'll agree.

      Delete
  3. ManiparnaAugust 3, 2014 at 9:52 PM

    I agree , being a friend is the best way....so that they can share their follies and successes with us..

    Happy Friendship Day to you too Sir... :-)

    ReplyDelete
  4. Roohi BhatnagarAugust 3, 2014 at 10:10 PM

    :) Happy Friendship day Tomichan,.. Glad I found a wonderful person with nice thoughts through blogging..

    ReplyDelete
  5. Online JournalistAugust 4, 2014 at 10:43 AM

    Happy 'Friendship Day' to all my Blogger Community Friends including Tomichan Sir.
    Though we have not seen one another, I love you all and am thankful to you all for visiting my blog and adding your comments on it and thus promoting it and increasing my blog traffic and $$$ taking me also to one of the Leading and top earning Bloggers of India.
    Thanks one and all.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalAugust 4, 2014 at 1:21 PM

      This is a very interesting comment. I've been blogging for over a decade now, but am yet to earn a single dollar :)

      Give me your address and I'll visit you in Oct-Nov since I may be coming over to AP for certain work.

      Delete
  6. Anita SabatAugust 4, 2014 at 11:21 AM

    Very true, Sir.
    Agree with your observations.
    May we all be friends. The world will be a better place...

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalAugust 4, 2014 at 1:21 PM

      If all people are genuinely concerned about other people, the world will be a paradise, Anita. Best wishes.

      Delete
  7. NamrotaAugust 4, 2014 at 11:38 AM

    Totally agree with you sir...and friendship is beyond age or gender any such categories.

    Happy friendship day to you too :)

    ReplyDelete
  8. BikramAugust 4, 2014 at 4:26 PM

    you are right sir, I dont know why we lose all that innocense as we grow up ..

    I hope every day is friendship day so it becomes a beautiful place to live in without any problems ..

    I am glad I came over this blog first time on such a good day Friendship day .. :)


    Bikram's

    ReplyDelete
  9. UnknownAugust 13, 2014 at 2:16 PM

    Friendship with adolescents in itself is a challenge because as an adult you are used to weighing pros and cons and looking for benefits for yourself. This sort of a friendship surely will teach us a lot more, agree totally about candidness as well.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalAugust 14, 2014 at 10:11 AM

      Unless you have an adolescent inside yourself it becomes difficult to deal with adolescents. That's why most adults seem to have problem with adolescents. But the adult inside us should be mature too; otherwise we will only create problems. Glad you could relate to the post.

      Delete
  10. wingsAugust 30, 2014 at 7:05 PM

    Sir, You may read this comment or not, I should agree with you that adolescents need a friendly touch which many adults do not understand. Actually to make friendship with an adolescent is an art. Some people call it a way to spoil the so called "child". What to do with such egoistic and rebellious adult adolescents?!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
44 comments
Read more

The Second Crucifixion

  ‘The Second Crucifixion’ is the title of the last chapter of Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins’s magnum opus Freedom at Midnight . The sub-heading is: ‘New Delhi, 30 January 1948’. Seventy-three years ago, on that day, a great soul was shot dead by a man who was driven by the darkness of hatred. Gandhi has just completed his usual prayer session. He had recited a prayer from the Gita:                         For certain is death for the born                         and certain is birth for the dead;                         Therefore over the inevitable                         Thou shalt not grieve . At that time Narayan Apte and Vishnu Karkare were moving to Retiring Room Number 6 at the Old Delhi railway station. They walked like thieves not wishing to be noticed by anyone. The early morning’s winter fog of Delhi gave them the required wrap. They found Nathuram Godse already awake in the retiring room. The three of them sat together and finalised the plot against Gand
6 comments
Read more

The Final Farewell

Book Review “ Death ends life, not a relationship ,” as Mitch Albom put it. That is why, we have so many rituals associated with death. Minakshi Dewan’s book, The Final Farewell [HarperCollins, 2023], is a well-researched book about those rituals. The book starts with an elaborate description of the Sikh rituals associated with death and cremation, before moving on to Islam, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and finally Hinduism. After that, it’s all about the various traditions and related details of Hindu final rites. A few chapters are dedicated to the problems of widows in India, gender discrimination in the last rites, and the problem of unclaimed dead bodies. There is a chapter titled ‘Grieving Widows in Hindi Cinema’ too. Death and its rituals form an unusual theme for a book. Frankly, I don’t find the topic stimulating in any way. Obviously, I didn’t buy this book. It came to me as quite many other books do – for reasons of their own. I read the book finally, having shelv
10 comments
Read more

Vultures and Religion

When vultures become extinct, why should a religion face a threat? “When the vultures died off, they stopped eating the bodies of Zoroastrians…” I was amused as I went on reading the book The Final Farewell by Minakshi Dewan. The book is about how the dead are dealt with by people of different religious persuasions. Dead people are quite useless, unless you love euphemism. Or, as they say, dead people tell no tales. In the end, we are all just stories made by people like the religious woman who wrote the epitaph for her atheist husband: “Here lies an atheist, all dressed up and no place to go.” Zoroastrianism is a religion which converts death into a sordid tale by throwing the corpses of its believers to vultures. Death makes one impure, according to that religion. Well, I always thought, and still do, that life makes one impure. I have the support of Lord Buddha on that. Life is dukkha , said the Enlightened. That is, suffering, dissatisfaction and unease. Death is liberation
4 comments
Read more

Cats and Love

No less a psychologist than Freud said that the “time spent with cats is never wasted.” I find time to spend with cats precisely for that reason. They are not easy to love, particularly if they are the country variety which are not quite tameable, and mine are those. What makes my love affair with my cats special is precisely their unwillingness to befriend me. They’d rather be in their own company. “In ancient time, cats were worshipped as gods; they have not forgotten this,” Terry Pratchett says. My cats haven’t, I’m sure. Pratchett knew what he was speaking about because he loved cats which appear frequently in his works. Pratchett’s cats love independence, very unlike dogs. Dogs come when you call them; cats take a message and get back to you as and when they please. I don’t have dogs. But my brother’s dogs visit us – Maggie and me – every evening. We give them something to eat and they love that. They spend time with us after eating. My cats just go away without even a look af
8 comments
Read more