I have a long, long list of “friends”. This list extends to both the physical world and the cyber realm. In fact, the list is longer in the latter category. Every person I meet invariably has a Facebook account. Either I’m sent a “friend request”, which I have to accept so as not to hurt the sender, or I force myself to send a “request”, lest I be branded unsociable. However, in reality you never request or accept friendships openly. In fact, the beauty of friendship is that it is involuntary, unconscious, without needing any visible effort. Friendship doesn’t need any explicit branding.
My list of friends in the real word is even more puzzling. Every acquaintance I meet is to be tagged as friend, no matter how little we know each other.
No matter, we may never know each other at all. Sometimes I meet these so-called friends whose only calling card is “We are Facebook friends” and thus become my physical world friends. Sometimes I get requests on Facebook, with the calling card, “We met today”.
Today all that you need to become friends is either see them or have a mutual Facebook friend.
Euphemism
Just as we often tend to gloss over our raw, physical cravings as “love”, we have started branding everybody a friend, without meaning it a wee bit. A classmate shouldn’t be called a classmate because apparently it sounds unemotional and cold.
Nobody cares to understand that I call her a classmate precisely because she isn’t my friend and I know virtually nothing about her. Who cares about all that when we can live in a phoney world of customary conventions and artificial pleasantness. Here the truth about a relationship is contrived as being frigid. The rule is that we all act cushy and warm, however phoney it might be in reality.
My father confesses to having very few friends but a lot of acquaintances. Likewise, there are very few people with whom I share everything, who are concerned about me. In other words, very few are my friends, and loads of “friends” are actually acquaintances. But to confess to it as my father easily does is difficult for me. Somehow, being friends with all and the number of likes for my Facebook DP (display picture) have unfairly and anomalously become parameters of my sociability.
My father reckons one can be sociable without having to be a friend to too many people. For him, calling someone a friend means something. It means a certain commitment and he is very careful about giving that commitment. To me, calling someone a friend is a cool thing to do, meaning nothing and it is so commonplace.
Successful people have very few friends and lots of acquaintances. They are being truthful to both their friends and their acquaintances about the nature of the relationship. In fact, the most successful wizard, Voldymort, had no friends but only followers. Eventually he was defeated by Harry Potter, who had lots of friends. But in this debauched, real world, the Voldymorts win while the Harrys don't even get their Hogwarts call letter.
vvramkumar@yahoo.com
