As someone who has grown up amongst a wide variety of friends, I was taken aback when a friend told me recently that it is increasingly becoming rare when you can have a conversation for conversation’s sake with someone even for a full hour. The implication in that moanful statement was that people have lost interest in relating to one another. That people don’t know or are no longer comfortable in handling relationships! Gone are the days when people enjoyed companionship purely for the sake of it. Now the new mantra was having fun however defined but having fun did not necessarily mean that people were building relationships. I wondered if this is a kind of cynical position or are truly healthy human relations becoming rarefied.

One frequent thought that people drop in response to friendships is that there is just no time. The pace of life, commuting, demands of work and family all have added to a situation where there is no time remaining for keeping in touch with friends. Hence, some relationships get dropped by the wayside. This is often the story of several women who when asked how many school or college friends they kept in touch with, many would not be able to count even one among them. The reason given is once they leave the educational system they get married and all attention, time and energies gets focused on the newer unit that they are part of after marriage. This is obviously no one’s fault but the social structures that men and women are part of, say marriage, elicit such responses from them.

But I am still left with a nagging feeling. It is not all about time is it? One of the factors that I have often heard is that friends whose social status or economic strata changes over a period of time lose touch faster than anything else. A newer unsaid dimension even if they don’t speak about it has entered the picture. The relative difference that has emerged in the material existence of the two friends who have grown together causes some tension. This perceived difference in status tends to diminish the frequency of contact between those who were earlier friends if not root out the relationship completely. Interestingly, factors like caste or race or language or religion or ethnicity tend to be overridden in the early days of the friendship and remain overwhelmed in relationships but class can be an intruder.

What next? We have noted time, gender and class as variables that affect friendships. Workplace/collegiate relations sometimes metamorphose into healthy friendships. This is a larger debate by itself but like class there is a need for caution if the levels of hierarchy of the friends are different. Whether we like it not, hierarchy in organizational contexts does play a role. Likewise can men and women be just friends as epitomized in the classic film ‘When Harry met Sally’? Again, there are ground rules for such relationships and they are very much possible.

Why is friendship important? What is hot about people being just friends? Clearly, these are the only ties that are not bound by blood or primordial sentiments like caste or race or ethnicity or religion or nationality, kinds of compartments within which we work in for most part of our lives. A friend is family indeed but just that s/he is not connected to you through blood ties. Our children are taught in their proverb/phrase books ‘A friend in need is a friend indeed.’ Whenever we are stuck with some issue or problem that we are unable to resolve by ourselves, we immediately think of a friend who can address this for us. Such is the supporting function of friends. But as stated at the very outset, it neither begins nor stops there.

Friendship is about another human presence. It is about the no-holds barred space which we long for in life but find it is all divided up in silos. One can speak one’s heart and mind to a friend and be accepted for who you are as you are. It is commonplace to hear people say in a marital context, “Ah, at last, you have found your SOUL-MATE.” Why the connectivity between ‘souls’ gets confined to marriage or they are only a prerogative of marriage is anyone’s guess? This could possibly be because of a social anxiety that marriage should be accorded the highest form of friendship. This is true but yet presents an incomplete picture because individuals define social spaces as they deem fit. In the process of evolving as a person, the insight of our friends about us are a source of nurture and criticism.

One pre-condition to friendship is that there are synergies between the two people or mutuality of perception and association. Several efforts are wasted when there is a complete difference between the perceptions of the two people regarding what constitutes their friendship and people are then forced to move on in life. Regardless of the type of friendship, trust is a critical factor which affects whether the friendship would last a lifetime or just one of those passing episodes of life.

Among the most important concerns is the deployment or claims or use of the term ‘friend’ in conversations. Numerous are the cross-cultural examples of pub-mates where one of them does not get invited to say the other’s wedding and is shocked, “ I thought that I was his friend.” Sure but did the latter take the trouble to decipher in what sense the term ‘friend’ was used? Don’t we all work with at least three gradations of social interaction? These are acquaintances, colleagues and friends. Acquaintences are those whom you meet on the street or in the corridor at work place; colleagues whom you spend the most part of 8 to 10 hours every week day and friends are those whom we have been talking about.

Popular media and history are replete with examples and references to friendships. Who can forget the mid-1970s classic Hindi film Sholay that celebrated friendship with the famous song ‘Yeh dosti !’ However, in the final analysis, friendship is an aesthetic almost spiritual principle. It is about the divine, sacred and beautiful in earthen human relationships. It is about the lived experience of bonding between people on the principle of common humanity. It is an idea that challenges the narrow-minded spaces that caste or race or religion or ethnicity or even class breed often in society.

May friendships win!