On Friendship

The movie Dil Chahta Hai came out in the year 2001. It followed the lives of three young people right from their college days, to the time when they each chose a different path in life, got separated, and then, as fate would have it, got reunited, driven on account of the presence of similar forces in their lives. In between, it depicted all the lazy pleasures associated with living and growing up together.

I do not remember when I first saw this movie. In hindsight it seems like a thing that had no beginning, and which gradually emerged as I grew up. It eventually became a part of who I was, and affected my understanding of what human bonds meant. For better or for worse this movie planted the seeds that emerged as the idea of friendship in my mind.

But that was almost fourteen years ago. And today, fourteen years is a lifetime.

Times have changed a lot, even during my (relatively) short life.

The young people of today can only meet during the weekends, they always have pending work which demands their time, their work has instilled in them a sense of value to be given to time that was absent just half a generation ago. This striving for productivity, efficiency, round-the-clock availability and strict deadlines has robbed us of the simple pleasures of life. Each passing day, we are getting more and more alienated from the people we love, from the moments we wish to live, and from the places we yearn to go to.

But the crowning glory of this human calamity has been that those very people have an unquestioning belief that this change is right, that it ought to be right, and that it couldn’t not be right. What worries me is not the validity of this belief, but the validity of this unquestioning attitude. Is a faster life really better for all of us?

Man was never meant to be a machine, so how did it find itself in such a predicament? That question deserves reflection on a line that is slightly tangential to what I wish to talk about here, and which, therefore, should be taken up some other time, for my focus, insofar as this piece is concerned, is on its effects on an individual in general and, somewhat narcissistically, on me in particular.

One of the tragedies of the modern man is that he is born in the twenty first century. Before the apparent tautological nature of the statement makes you miss the wood for the trees, let me clarify.

Today, the difference in the worlds that a modern human lives in during his childhood, his adolescence and his adulthood is too great. When I was in class three, nobody I knew had a mobile phone, and today, in just eighteen years, I do not know anyone who doesn’t have a mobile phone. This change isn’t just about the penetration of mobile devices, in fact it is symptomatic of something far wider in scope – the technological revolution.

I haven’t checked the facts, but I am sure at no other point in the history of mankind has one generation witnessed so much change, and I am not even necessarily referring to technological changes here.

But I am digressing. And yet I am not!

The ideas I grew up cherishing had already become out-dated by the time I entered my mid-twenties. I would have laughed them off otherwise, and maybe that is the only option I have, but the irony isn’t lost on me.

Today, people don’t have time to sit and talk, don’t have time to share your silences, don’t have time to really immerse themselves in something, for they already have something else in their minds – maybe an upcoming meeting, or an incomplete presentation, or a client’s call and what not. They have adapted and learnt to live in these changing times, sometimes driven by a sense of duty to their work and sometimes by choice. But I ask them, what is your duty towards yourself, towards the voice within you?

The choices people make reflect the priorities they give to different things in their life. Even among your friends, you will find all kinds of people, each with a different life journey. Then what binds them to you? That is a very difficult question, but an answer to which may be found, I am sure, in the realm of feelings and thoughts.

I may spend years trying to find a reflection of Dil Chahta Hai in my life, and never find it. But should this fact disappoint me?

Well, we all have our share of disappointments. And in these times, a fashionable solution has emerged – a solution as brilliant as it is misleading. “Stop expecting”. It is brilliant because it makes us genuinely believe that we have found the solution, and misleading because it doesn’t tell us the price we have unwittingly paid for this solution.

Here is the actual answer you needed to know.

Your expectations from a person have to be a function of the person’s personality and his life journey. For example, you may expect, with success, that a friend who likes art will accompany you to an art gallery. Or that a friend who is an avid reader will go to the Lit Fest in your city. But you’ll be damned if you switch these expectations, and then you will end up accepting some stranger’s words on the internet who will say, sagaciously, that you should “stop expecting”. And lo and behold, you will have robbed yourself of all the things which you had a right to expect, and the somewhat assured possibility of actually living and experiencing. Sigh.

By all means, expect. And expect more. But remember that this right to expect demands a duty to give understanding. Give understanding that their life journey and personality could be very different from yours.  And this understanding will, in turn, provide you with wisdom – of what to expect, and from whom.

I will wait for my friends. Till the time I either find a reflection of Dil Chahta Hai in my life, or I understand what their Dil Chahta Hai is, what their heart really desires. What do they really want, when they are all disrobed from their worldly cloaks. When I can talk to them in complete honesty. When I can know them and really feel one with them.

Till the time these feelings don’t come out in the form of verses, these few words shall remain my ode to friendship.