Earlier this month, there were celebrations of Friendship Day.  I really cannot say whether it is appropriate to just assign one day in a year as Friendship Day. Friendship has been rated as one of the most beautiful relationships in the life of any person. This is mainly due to its unconditional quality.

And if there is a friend of yours who places conditions for the friendship, the sooner you distance yourself from him or her the better it would be for you. This is the only relationship where you can easily pick up the strings from where you left, in case there has been an interval in the relationship due to one reason or the other.           

We all have several friends and in fact, several categories of friends! There are those whom we frequently meet, others whom we meet a few times in a year and yet others who we meet once in several years. Sometimes the intensity of our feelings for the last category of friends may exceed that for the first and second categories.

All this depends on how firm the foundation of a particular friendship is. Can it weather distance and time or does it need reassurance frequentlyIJ Can the friends relate to each other intuitively or do they always need to meet each other to keep up the rapportIJ I am sure all of you can identify a few among your friends with whom you really do not have to make any efforts whatsoever to maintain a comfort level. This is what true friendship is all about.

There is no place for ego in friendship.As soon as it enters the relationship, things go sour and it is very difficult to control the damage. Differences may be patched but the innocence and goodness of the friendship cannot be restored in most cases where ego in one of the friends or in both of them has created a distance between them.

There are those friends who are just a phone call away and are standing with you whenever you call them ,even if  it  is late in the night.  There are others who always depend on you to rescue them from difficult situations they are facing. Sometimes, just having a friend with you can make the most difficult moments in life easier.

When we honestly ask ourselves which people in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that they are our friends  who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen  to share our pain and heal our wounds with a warm and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in our of grief and bereavement, and  who can face with us  our helplessness is a true friend.

We can choose our friends and that is what makes our equation with them better usually than that with relatives whom we can ,unfortunately, not choose. Friendships that  grow up with us from childhood have a special place in our hearts as these are relationships in which the friends have seen each other pass through various stages of life — adolescence , maturity, mid-life. There is a sea of shared memories that keep such friends very close. Such bonds are very precious and not everyone is lucky enough to have such life long friendships.

The great philosopher Aristotle said, “A friend is a second self.” This is indeed  true. There are many things which our friends can understand better about us at times than we ourselves can. Friends are soulmates and n read our eyes and even the tone of our voice. It is difficult to hide anything from them just like we cannot hide things from our mothers. They simply know.

These are times when emotions seem to be taking a backseat in our  lives. There is so much of pretence  around us. It is not easy to distinguish a genuine person from a fake one. But even now, we strike friendships. Sometimes they work. At others, they do not. But nothing can change so much in the world that there remains no scope for making friends. Whatever happens, whatever changes, whatever evolves, emotions may lose some intensity at times ..but there will always be friends around,at least one true friend for each one of us.

In fact, in these times of hypocrisy and materialism, to find just one sincere friend in one’s lifetime is an achievement to be proud of.