Skip to main content

Friends


There’s something in me that resists making friends.  Except for a brief period of my youth, I kept away from people as much as possible.  That brief period itself was the cause.  Those whom I considered friends were mocking me at my back.  When I learnt that I chose solitude except at the professional level. 

If people found me funny enough to have hearty laughs at my cost, there must be something wrong with me.  That’s why I quit socialising.  So it’s not the others I’m blaming; it’s myself.  However, I’m not wallowing in self-pity.  It’s just that I learnt that I wasn’t meant for being with people.  So I chose books as my friends. 

But there are a few individuals whom I can call friends with whom I maintain meaningful contact.  As meaningful as the relationship between Piglet and Winnie the Pooh:
Piglet sidled up to Pooh from behind.
"Pooh!" he whispered.
"Yes, Piglet?"
"Nothing," said Piglet, taking Pooh's paw. "I just wanted to be sure of you.” 




Comments

  1. Sir, there is nothing wrong with you. Those people are truly great manipulators. That's just what they do. Only because​, they can't handle what's right about you.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Failing to learn the ways of the world is the most serious failure.

      Delete
  2. I agree. I do feel like I am at loss and do want to be like others. But knowing that someone else is doing just fine being in his own skin gives me a relief.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Probably it's the same reason why I took a liking to you ☺

      Delete
  3. Your insight into the social aspects, knowledge level on the topics you discuss, control over the grammatical English, keen interest to bring out the oft sidelined issues and boldness in calling a spade a spade are clearly noticeable as one goes thru' your Posts.. All these qualities together are really rare in a Blogger!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I'm indeed glad to hear that, sir, especially from you. Thanks a lot.

      Delete
  4. Well, Sir, I'd like to differ with you. Making someone laugh is quite a difficult task. I always fail in doing so. In my opinion, you are a blessed one. Also, you didn't quit socialising because, as I see, you're using the medium of blogging to socialise with us.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The virtual society is quite different from the real one. Thanks for letting me know that I belong there fairly well. And the laugh part - my fb profile describes me as 'The joker in the pack'. ☺

      Delete
  5. Very sweet story of Piglet and Pooh.

    ReplyDelete

  6. Your blogs reveal that your friends circle is quite large. It will expand further when you consider those who only read your blogs but seldom respond!

    ‘Friends’ ‘meaningful contact’ are ambiguous words. But I am sure you have a larger group of admirers and followers than you may be aware of or wish to admit

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I really didn't mean the friends in social networks or readers of my blogs. Still glad this post elicited a comment from you.

      Delete
  7. I feel sorry for those people who failed to see the gem in you. Friend or no friend, I really admire you always :-)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks, Amit. Maybe I wasn't a very likeable person as a young man. Youth and folly go hand in hand as they say. :)

      Delete
  8. All are strangers until you meet them. All are friends until you know them.

    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

Don Bosco

Don Bosco (16 Aug 1815 - 31 Jan 1888) In Catholic parlance, which flows through my veins in spite of myself, today is the Feast of Don Bosco. My life was both made and unmade by Don Bosco institutions. Any great person can make or break people because of his followers. Religious institutions are the best examples. I’m presenting below an extract from my forthcoming book titled Autumn Shadows to celebrate the Feast of Don Bosco in my own way which is obviously very different from how it is celebrated in his institutions today. Do I feel nostalgic about the Feast? Not at all. I feel relieved. That’s why this celebration. The extract follows. Don Bosco, as Saint John Bosco was popularly known, had a remarkably good system for the education of youth.   He called it ‘preventive system’.   The educators should be ever vigilant so that wrong actions are prevented before they can be committed.   Reason, religion and loving kindness are the three pillars of that syste...

Relatives and Antidepressants

One of the scenes that remain indelibly etched in my memory is from a novel of Malayalam writer O V Vijayan. Father and little son are on a walk. Father tells son, “Walk carefully, son, otherwise you may fall down.” Son: “What will happen if I fall?” Father: "Relatives will laugh.” I seldom feel comfortable with my relatives. In fact, I don’t feel comfortable in any society, but relatives make it more uneasy. The reason, as I’ve understood, is that your relatives are the last people to see any goodness in you. On the other hand, they are the first ones to discover all your faults. Whenever certain relatives visit, my knees buckle and the blood pressure shoots up. I behave quite awkwardly. They often describe my behaviour as arising from my ego, which used to be a oversized in yesteryear. I had a few such visitors the other day. The problem was particularly compounded by their informing me that they would be arriving by about 3.30 pm and actually reaching at about 7.30 pm. ...

Coffee can be bitter

The dawns of my childhood were redolent of filtered black coffee. We were woken up before the birds started singing in the lush green village landscape outside home. The sun would split the darkness of the eastern sky with its splinter of white radiance much after we children had our filtered coffee with a small lump of jaggery. Take a bite of the jaggery and then a sip of the coffee. Coffee was a ritual in our home back then. Perhaps our parents believed it would jolt our neurons awake and help us absorb our lessons before we set out on the 4-kilometre walk to school after all the morning rituals at home. After high school, when I left home for further studies at a distant place, the ritual of the morning coffee stopped. It resumed a whole decade later when I completed my graduation and took up a teaching job in Shillong. But I had lost my taste for filtered coffee by then; tea took its place. Plain tea without milk – what is known as red tea in most parts of India. Coffee ret...

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...