Good Friends Means a World To Me

"A friend is one to whom one may pour out all the contents of one’s heart, chaff and grain together, knowing that the gentlest of hands will take and sift it, keep what is worth keeping, and with the breath of kindness blow the rest away."
Unknown

Each time I feel useless and a burden on the earth, (Dharti ka bhojj) a friend walks closer to my heart, unfolds the clouds of depression and lifts my spirit up. Friends’ smiles have added a bright sunshine in my life and I have found them at every walk of life. Flashback to my childhood, takes me to a profile of a close friend who cared a lot for me. Her name was Usha Singh, I don’t know where she is now but we were very close to each other at the age of 5years.

Rolling through the transcript of my life, I have moved places, countries, life and lost many friends on the route; I change a new best friend, (every five years, I have noticed), matching my personality with them. I didn’t forget their names (I do remember them) but didn’t keep in touch with them after they crossed the borders over to their new life with a different name. Through the social media, I have found few and have interacted with them too but I have moved on.

Essential base for friendship is utility, pleasure, virtue, honesty and common interest.

On social network too, we develop friendship with the person whom we have never met, but that is on an intellectual level. I have many virtual close friends to whom I feel connected and care a lot. When I don’t see them for long period, I worry about their well-being. These are friends to whom we are attracted not by the way they look (most of them are photo-shopped profiles, but who care?) but by their skills, talent and thoughts. These friendships do break off when the expectation does not match with our imaginations. They shouldn’t. But what can one say of a friend who is disappointed by the way we look? Is it important to match the looks with intelligence and comfort?

Pleasure is the essential base for friendship.

Every friendship has a pleasure attached. We can overlook the short-comings of a person that cannot be helped, like color, caste, size, health. (These are always overlooked on online friends). But friendship should bring a joy for it to flourish. We have a good reason to reject her/him when we meet them personally if we are offended by the way they behave. On a physical level, we tend to observe their ethics, manners and culture, their ability to talk sensibly and their sensitively towards delicate issues. The cleanliness and their dressing style also matters. The person who has no time to take care of themselves first because they are lazy to do so, how can we expect them to find time for us?

Let’s face facts. There has to be a utility value to the friendship. Everybody needs moral, physical and emotional support. Friendship follows the rule: I give, and you give too. It has to be interactive and reciprocal. The gender of the friendship is not important but if it is just one way friendship, it cannot last for long. The best friendship is the friendship between women. Women have the caring nature and are willing to offer help whenever the need arises. There is so much to share. It’s not gossip, it’s emotional speculation, a good friendships that lasts life-time understands all the qualities of a close friend, good/bad, and accepts them.

Once a friend, always a friend is my mantra.

In a good friend, sentiments and honesty is the only glue that binds the relationship for ever.

Participating in a post a day with Marathon Bloggers

Literary Meeting with ‘Shakespeare and Company’ group

I visited Bangalore after 20 years this week-end. I remember Bangalore as a garden city with quaint bungalows and wide clean streets. Development has changed the entire city, with airport so far away that I was getting guilty pangs on having asked my family to spend two hours to fetch me from airport to the city. But then I do not understand the roads and would not be able to use public transport therefore had no choice but to depend on the residents of the city to transport me around through the fractured roads.

I went for four days, two days to meet-up the family whom I had not met for a long time and two days to meet the members of S&C community of writers whom I had never met. This is the writer's community with whom I have interacted on FaceBook and we regularly share writing skill and ideas. This would be fun group for people taking writing classes as well. All the informal knowledge is shared through fun and jest.

Pragya Thakur, the moderator of this group, was making the visit to Bangalore with her daughter, Anushka, and wanted to meet with the members of the group. The event was created on the FB and members were showing their interest in attending this event “Revels 2012’ Jaya Chandra offered to host the event at her villa at Whitefield, Gopu and JJ organized the event, arranging food, sound and logistics.

The meeting was in Bangalore and I live in Mumbai, so why did I decide to travel all the way to Bangalore to attend this event? 


I am not even a great writer who can proudly share about some extra-ordinary work with the rest of the group. But here was an opportunity to re-visit the place, meet the family who has grown older by 20 years and to meet my faceBook friends whom I had never met before but knew them only from their writings. 


 Friendship for me is complete only after I have met the people personally and interacted with them in real world and this was my only chance to meet the real people whose writings gave me so much happiness.

Confirming my attendance, I booked my air-ticket and hotel room but was still nervous of meeting the FB friends the first time. Through chat pages and phone calls, I exchanged dialogue with few of them so that I would be comfortable when I met them personally.

After spending two days with my family, at 2pm on 18^th Feb, I checked into my hotel room next to Pragya’s room, dumped my luggage and immediately ran to her room to meet her and her daughter, Anoshka. The two hours were spent enjoying JJ’s presence, Anoshka’s innocent chatter and dance, Pragya’s chat and songs.

At 4pm, it was time to meet the rest of the group at the hotel lobby. One by one, as if on a ramp, each friend made her presence through the glass door, crinkling her eyes, recognizing me from the images she had known of my virtual profile pictures and my animated chat which now morphed into three-dimensional real person, to whom I stretched my heart, tied a knot and strengthened the friendship into my real world.

With transport meticulously arranged by Gopu and JJ, we drove in four cars, one behind another, making sure that nobody got lost. At the dot of 5pm, we were greeted by our gracious host, Jaya and Mahesh, who stood with open arms at the portico of their beautiful villa surrounded by greenery, the birds began to sing with the orchestra filling the wind.

The artistic interiors of the living room and the fragrance from Jaya’s kitchen of fritters cooking in hot oil made me feel so much at home. Although it was time to mingle and familiarize, the hunger pangs made me spend more time on munching and talking food. I stole some time to feast on dhal-kachories, potato bajiyas, cheesy popcorns, spicy wafers, crackers and strawberries till it was time to move out in the open space, on the chairs spread out on grassy patch, at the back of the villa. The presence of the mike and the spot lights spelled the seriousness of this meeting.

After the group photograph and the formal introduction, the event ‘Revel 2012’ began.

Maitreyee, the one blessed with the beauty and the brains, was the perfect one to start the reading session followed by Sushmita and then one by one, we heard the play of words by different writers as they read out their poetry and prose, so intelligently worded, flipping out from their scripts, filling the air with vivid images. I fumbled in my mind, not sure if I could share my mediocre work with this creative group. Twice I inserted my hand into my purse to extract my book and twice stuffed it back, not sure if I could share.

Suddenly the power went out. In darkness we sat, gazing up in the sky pointing out to constellation of stars, the Orion and its bright stars, the great bear and the seven stars, the little bear and the Polaris, we scanned the dark blue sky looking in all directions and at that very instant, there was a song…..Pragya started to sing…in the perfect stillness of the evening it was pleasant to the ears, soon everybody joined in, some softly and some loud, then Gopu commenced, enthralled us with his deep smooth voice, the memories of Kishore Kumar and Shamshad Begam Akhtar came alive along with other singers long forgotten, the chairs shifted in two groups and unplanned antakshri began.

Soon the lights came on, ankatshri game abandoned; we tracked our steps back to ‘Revel 2012’

Uma got her ipad and tried to include Ranjini (who was physically across seven seas but mentally with us) into the group through skype. But the bad interconnectivity gave us just a glimpse of her and tried as much as we could, I only managed to type a feeble “Hey”

With internet connected, Madhavan was able to extract his writings from his blog, and later he and Richa read ‘Dhaiya re dhaiya’ Richa and Revathi read their winning entries of ‘short stories competition’. By now, the phobia of reading my work was slowly fading, I plucked up enough courage, extracted my diary and my reading glasses from my handbag and waited for my turn to read my poems. I was happy I did because it felt good to share my work and I discovered it was not that bad after all.

As the evening progressed, the air thinned, it was getting chilly, I borrowed a shawl from Jaya, wrapped myself and sat cuddled, enjoying the reading and the off-handed hilarious one liners of Madhavan thrown in between the serious readings.

 Soon the theatre came alive with evocative reading of the play ‘Taming of the Shrew’ by Kirtana and JJ

Not wanting to disturb the neighbors, we decided to move back to the living room to continue the reading after dinner.


There was more reading to be heard of Suja reading her published stories, of Pragya sharing a creative writings, of Uma, Jaya, SeekerSought, Gopu, Gargi, Sangeeta and Shankari reading their stories, but the clock on the wall glared at us, showing us the lateness of the hour. The event had to be winded up in a jiffy but not before the announcement of the lucky winners (Anitha Murthy, Revathi Siva Kumar and Richa Dubey) of the ‘short story competition’  and taking home the prize.

It was a wonderful event, worth the long distance trip that I had covered from Mumbai to Bangalore to attend; I have acquired a new set of extended literary family that I hope to retain this friendship for long……

Passing the parcel

Although my birthday was last month, but it never ends till all my friends have wished me, so today, another set of friends (just eight) came over for lunch to enjoy the belated party.


Now eight is a big number for a private party and I don’t like to leave anybody out of conversation so I decided to have some games to get everybody involved. After the delicious lunch of Veg Briyani, Samosas, bhajiyas and Raita followed by chocolate ice-cream, we started the normal game of bingo for warm up and almost everybody received a small gift for their participation as the play progressed from jaldifive to 3 lines to full house.

Next we started to play the interesting game of passing the parcel. When we were kids, game of passing the parcel was all time favorite where we had punishments which would be quite entertaining with something like ’sing a song’ or imitate so-n-so, or some other childish punishment which sometimes would be quite an embarrassment. But today these kinds of punishments were not on my mind. I wanted to do something innovative.

So I made list of six topics for discussion as punishments where in I put the question and the person was asked to express her views. Following questions were asked:

Q1: As we all know that Imran is a gay icon- how will our community behave if they start exposing gays. Do you think that older generation will be able to accept this fact? What kind of conversation will the people be having during discussion of latest trend of our youth?

Q2 Do you feel suicidal sometimes? What things irritate you the most and you get this kind of feeling that the world is not worth living in?

Q3 Do you think media is responsible today? If you were a reporter what would be your first priority of reportage?

Q4 You know your friends are not paying attention to their health. You want to help them but you also know that she/he is not likely to follow your advice. What strong words would you use to bring home the message?

Q5Do you believe in idol worship and blind faith? If someday, you became a spiritual guide, what kind of preaching would you do to explain the existence of Supreme Being?

Q6 How responsible is our Indian Cinema? If you were given chance to make a film, what kind of movie will you make? What important message would you give in your films and whom would you cast in the film?

There was heavy discussion on every topic and there were difference of opinions too. The fun part of this game was that one person spoke while the rest listened carefully and gave their feedback and there was some healthy conversation. Normally, the shy ones never get chance to speak and they are left out from conversation. This way, everybody was participating.

The discussions went on till tea-time after which we all headed to Baidas Hall, Vile Parle, to hear the Vedanta lecture on ‘Happiness’ by Jaya Row.

‘My Sins against Gender-Stereotypes’

I saw this tag ‘Sin against Gender Stereotypes’ on the pages of several bloggers and secretly learnt about likes/dislikes of many blogger- friends, but waited patiently for a formal invitation, I am not a gate-crasher and therefore never make any entry till I am invited….and when Pallavi tagged me, I, most happily, cleared my throat…..cough, cough…to speak….so here I go….

I used to be a girlie-gurl once upon a time, a shy, reserved, timid, invisible till I grew up to discover that I am a human too and not a show-piece and am allowed to have a mind of my own. I realized that if one likes something, one does not think of gender, but is led by the instinct of doing what one feels is right with clear conscious and doing it in the best way that one can…..and so the freedom of expression was born in me and I learnt to live.

 NOW if I… feel like doing something..I will do it.. I need no permission, nor any public approval nor any gender margins to do what I please:

1.  I like male-talks better than girlish-chat..I hate talking abt maids, children, kitty parties, prefer to talk biz, money, investments or lifestyle trends..
2.  I like humor and also PJs, ragging, sharing anecdotes and will stay up late nights to chill with friends
3. TV..nah…no more… .once upon a time I was a couch potato, knew all the TV personalities by their first name, their problems, their relationships on screen, could discuss the soap/serial characters as if they were family members.. until the computers and web 2.0 took over my life, now I am glued to the virtual world. Can't detox because my virtual friends live there and I love to meet them everyday.
4. Cannot cope up with high class designers labels nor able to afford the extravagant life-styles of my Sindhi community, so have got over the fetishism over fancy, loud clothes and diamonds and have reverted to simple clothing and unreal jewelry.
5. Would prefer walks by the sea-shores rather than imprison myself over three hour of torture inside a cinema hall munching over unhygienic samosas and stale popcorns. Nevertheless, I do go for a film if others want me to go with them.
6.  Prefer home cooked food over the restaurant food. Have difficulty in swallowing white moldy parathas that contains sticky oils and the over-cooked veggies that contain too much of random spice powders.
7. Sleeping late, waking up late makes me miss some important dates.
8. Can repair everything, radios, clocks, lights, iron, electronic gadgets, plumbing, zips and even broken umbrellas and shoes and bags.
9.  Can read and understand the manuals, never use anything without reading the manual, will not sign anything till I have read all the fine print, will not believe anything unless I have heard, seen and witnessed it.
10.  Find it difficult to say ‘NO’ to anybody seeking favor, love kids and old people and will always try to make things easier for the weak.

And now to tag……umph…er..my friends…whom I truly want to know their sins….

My friend has threatened me with a curse to wear blue pants (since I am a woman) and it was pink shirts if I were to tag a man – for next twelve years if I did not compile this list and now, after having done my bit, I pass on this curse to you UNLESS you list at least ten things you have ever wanted or done which your gender is not supposed to.

The tag is called ‘My Sins against Gender-Stereotypes’. And you must tag twelve blogging friends or else you will be ….. er…what was that you said, Pallavi??? So get going gals....

Hiyaa Israni
Ani
Vimmi Jaggi
Mayuri Sharrma
Pragya
Alakaline
Suniti Joshi
Darpana
Ratna Rajaiah
Sangeeta Patni
Gayatri
Jhumur
Laxmi
Natasha Sinha
Baisali Chatterji
Soma ghosh

And like I whispered to you earlier, I now repeat 'khule aam'
"Sweets things r easy to buy but sweet ppl difficult to find, life ends when u stop caring, friendship ends when u stop sharing….."

so taking few liberties, I tagged u in my note hoping that you accept my tag and tell me things that I wish to know…..because I am confident that u r my friend….hugz 

Here and There

My friend tells me that she wants to go out of Mumbai with me for few days. I am reminded of the last trip that we went out, and am thinking whether I should go for the next one with her, again?

"Where do you want to go?" I ask her wondering why she ever wants to go anywhere. During our last trip, all she wanted to do was eat, shop or sleep. She wasn’t very much interested in looking around. Our taste differs in every way, but she is just content to go out with me and my friends.

Not that I mind, actually I do like it, I do like to spend time with my friends, I like to talk of thing here and there, share some jokes and learn something from each other’s experiences, but what I like the most is the adventure of trying something new. When we go to a new place, I want to visit the museums, see the new culture, taste the local food, and meet the natives to talk about their common issues. There is certain kind of energy that creeps into my body during the trips out of station. I am able to adjust to all the unavoidable discomfort, but not she.

And, my main problem is the time factor. I am not an early bird. When I wake up, she has already finished her morning walk, had her bath and breakfast, is dressed tip-top from head to toe and is walking impatiently in the room, left, right, left, right, waiting for me to rise. Can’t blame her if she is tired by the time I am done with bath. I always skip the breakfast and we go out for lunch. I don’t like shopping and walking aimlessly, but she does.

What we do together is sit and chat till late nights, play some board games or other creative games, and laugh a lot. In the group of eight, if all are not same, we are not annoyed.

But is that the reason enough to plan the next trip???