How, over time, friendships change! Friends become acquaintances; acquaintances, friends. Acquaintance-colleague-friendship matrix isn’t exactly like childhood friendship and rarely replicates the uninhibited friendship of younger days — they verge on formality. Not surprisingly, inscrutable time kills as much as it heals. It kills friendships through disuse, the distance — geographical, mental, societal — not exactly helping the cause. In a rapidly changing possessive individualistic world with upward social mobility the leitmotif, friendships are tossed over in a limitless sea of possibilities. Quickly they hammer out inherent probabilities, mutated by social status, material riches and professional necessities. Calling them friendships is a travesty.
Sadly, this churning smothers most childhood friendships. If they motor along with cloying symbolism on past emotion and ancient love, they hobble about on putative crutches. The crutches are addenda, external to the original, pristine friendship’s schema that admitted friends into the private recesses of one’s mind. The synthesis of mutual ideas, preferences, likes, dislikes was the bedrock on which friendship efflorescenced.
It would be presumptuous to put this to human cunning and aspiration. As paths take different trajectories, friends with humble glow feel unwanted and lost with successful friends who were once friends. The commonality of interest they once shared is in tatters what with the turbo-charged now grown fretful to share precious time with the proletariat also-friend for reasons of childhood baggage now appearing hoary.
Friendships, never set in stone, start withering. The meetings with little-something-to-share become scarcer, the telephone vibes rarer, and text messages missing. Time, the friendship-pooper, has raised its ugly head.
It takes two exceptional human beings differently placed in life to stay the steadfast friends of yore. Each need to forget his existential place society has blessed/condemned him with/to and finds that sliver of common interest to keep friendship going. Often such relationships peter out unless the successful and rich is full up with the punctilio of higher code and sensibility to take that extra care.
Today’s friendships are different, sculpted in schools/colleges, in offices/workplaces, where families rarely figure. During our times families provided the bedrock, a benevolent eye and loving glue that made friends more than friends. Friends’ families became another family, where they could put their feet up and relax. Friends stayed at each other’s places, because it felt nice to have them for a few days.
Today, my children’s world is different. They prefer eating ‘Mac’ at food courts together, and not with friends’ families. When I hear them traffic in their stereotypes, I stop telling them the fetishes of their ways. The family glue that encompassed our friendships providing avuncular touch is missing. Unlike ours, we know little of our children’s friends, let alone their families. The world’s changed; the informality of our times has morphed into a more formal frame informed with individual human calculus.
Human relationship is a manifestation of the time we live in. Amid this web of intense competition, it would be facetious of me to valorise that my children’s friendship or the lingering friendship of my younger days would conjure visions of a world-and-time long gone. If there are some still trundling along with the intensity of younger days and with the same languid silkiness of time-in-hand, go count your blessings.