Life is a full circle – and in early part of the circle – we encounter with an entity called Friends – and with each passing year the universe of this so called term Friend – grows bigger and wider in number– and soon we enter the vicious circle of friends where we end up terming each one we know outside our family as friends. While we may use the term Friend casually often in lack of a suitable alternative, this often leads to disillusionment. We forget that they are acquaintances, associates, colleagues, partners and not necessarily friend. But then we love to define our relationships and all such unaccounted ones fall in category of friends.
We live in an era, where friendship is defined by one who likes our Face book status regularly, writes good comments on our profile picture, heaps false praises on everything we share or do or the ones from whom we benefit from personally or professionally. These are people who validate to us that we are happy in our lives, through their likes and comments. They make us feel the “star” in our own wedding to honeymoon picture to baby picture by their cute comments. We secretly regret that the journey from wedding to baby cannot be shared with them; otherwise we would have loved to get their likes and comments about our other skills too. Even the ugliest looking couple, gets to hear they are looking so cute in that picture. We know they lie, but we love those lies. Their lies give us high. But the day they stop to lie,we leave them to die. We hate people who shows courage to challenge us, points out our follies, we resist, call them names and bitch about them conveniently till our ego satisfies and our self-esteem is held high.
When we were kids or in our growing years in school or colleges, perhaps when we were a little more tolerance, a little less selfish and perhaps a little more honest, we carefully listened to what our friends said – friends whom we studied with, whom we played with. They were ones who did not fear to tell the truth at our face, scolded us when they thought we were wrong, hugged us when we needed them, saved us from teachers and most importantly loved us unconditionally – for what we are and not our pretence.
Every invention probably brings with it seeds of destruction. Technology has single-handedly ensured that the blood and flesh of a relationship is substituted by virtual, unreal world, where there are momentary happiness and high like a dose of cocaine or marijuana. Those timeless personalized long conversations; long letters has got substituted by social apps and games. Candy crush has substituted the longing for real life crush. Our personalities, our choice of people have been defined by what gadgets we carry or probably what app we use. It’s time we get back to our old lives. It’s time to “un-friend” the excess baggage that has rotten us from inside and cleanse.
For a change let’s celebrate “ Happy Unfriendship Day” – make that long friend list on social media a little leaner and get ourselves a little closer to people who really mean the world to us and vice-versa. We need people who have time for us and not just their mere likes on our posts. People who would hug us warmly when we need them and not express his/her love through smiley and calling us "darling", "sweety" and "deary". We all share a responsibility to protect that sacred relationship called “Friendship” which is under serious threat of extinction – the one God has enabled us to create for ourselves with love and not the ones Face book recommended us to create.
N.B Images used are taken from Google
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