The Chambers’s 20th Century Dictionary gives the meaning of a friend as an intimate acquaintance and the Oxford Dictionary defines a friend as a person with whom one has a bond of mutual affection, exclusive of sexual or family relations. It is a close and intimate bond that marks the relationship. Right from childhood we repeatedly hear the adage ‘A friend in need is a friend indeed’.
One wonders how friendships begin and grow. The first friendship one develops as a child is with the mother. Over the years the mother’s role as a friend gets relegated to the background. When a child joins kindergarten it comes into contact with outsiders and then blooms the first friendship outside home. The starting of friendships often is from funny situations. If you accompany your child to a nursery, the first few days you are bound to see the way some friendships begin. Decades ago I witnessed a child crying after her mother left her at the nursery. Another child kept watching her for a while and then slowly moved up to her and holding her hand smiled at her and took her in. A friendship blossomed that day. I have also witnessed how two howling children got together….maybe it’s the start of a friendship.
Strange are the ways how people get attracted to each other and become friends. While the saying is that birds of the same feather flock together, the cases of people with totally divergent attitudes getting together is not uncommon. Close friendship is sometimes formed between people from different economic and social backgrounds. Sometimes a kind word or a thoughtful deed to a stranger is the beginning of a long and lasting friendship. All this just indicates that friendship is not something that we can plan and script. It just happens.
It is easy to make and get friends but to be loyal and to continue the friendship needs a kind of devotion that is akin to romantic love between man and woman, only without the frills and wings. It is a bond of minds where selflessness and sincerity and openness should be intricately weaved. Over the years, close friends in school and colleges are likely to go on in life and their company may not be available constantly. During my college days when there were no mobile phones and Internet, friendships were kept alive through letters. The postman had a very important role in our lives then. Writing long letters to keep friends abreast of the new surroundings and to share the glee and grief of new circumstances was a pleasure for most of us of that generation.
Of course today a friend can be just an e-mail or chat away. However, to retain the attachment, even when priorities change in one’s life, is the lifeline of true friendship. Such friendships do not need a Friendship Day to celebrate the relationship.