It seems each day of the year now commemorates something — teddy bears, safety pins, parents, lovers.
A group of friends at Shivaji Park, Dadar, during Friendship Day last year
It seems each day of the year now commemorates something — teddy bears, safety pins, parents, lovers. This irritates many people. I, too, scoff at some days — the pieties of Mother’s Day make me a little nauseous. Still, if you ignore the marketing, it’s amazing what wildly diverse things humans consider valuable.
So, today is Friendship Day. Which, I love, because I love friendship, which I feel has made all my hardest choices easier. As teenagers, friendship was an intense business of blow-by-blow emotional reportage. At the time I thought it the domain of the young. I could not imagine older people having such a strong inner life as I could not see them outside their roles of mom or dad or aunt or grandparent. What a prison that would be for them if they had no friends!
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A group of friends at Shivaji Park, Dadar, during Friendship Day last year
Which, of course, all the adults around me had — friendships every bit as intimate and important as mine, where particular days and rituals were earmarked for certain friends, and long letters and phone calls bridged distances with intensity. Friendship is the one relationship where we are more than a role — parent, child, spouse, lover. It’s a relationship in which we constantly shape our individuality, our younger and older selves simultaneously present.
Some people feel true friends can say anything to you. Consequently, we tend to tell friends where they are wrong, rarely expressing how they are wonderful, express why we came to love them and why, even as we see them at their faultiest, we like loving them in infinitely changing ways. I’ve learned that it is rather, the converse: that true friends are those to whom you can say anything about yourself — your worst, most foolish or petty self — and be listened to without judgement. That is how friends show you the road to a likeable and love-able you. Recently, a friend wrote to me after a long time, a letter of appreciation for my work and my life choices. No letter of praise can match it. When friends appreciate us they do not place us on a pedestal or patronise us. They do it at the same level, eyes meeting eyes as equals who recognise what your life’s journey is and the person you are trying to be — not the position you hold.
These appreciations are acts of comradeship, a feeling of having appreciative companions on a road, from which your heart can draw confidence and courage, allow itself to open and let more things in — joy, difficulty, struggle and new friends too. Nothing equips us to make more friends as having loving friendships already.
People complain about social media, but I often feel it allows me to see again a friend I might have drifted away from or disagreed with — their qualities as a person, a parent, a photographer or storyteller and get to like them differently, form new, sometimes abstract, but no less meaningful friendships with them.
I like that Friendship Day comes in the same month as Independence Day, for nothing is freer than friendship, made of one's own choice, endlessly enjoyable for itself, but also thoughtfully nurtured and protected. Friendship gives us a human identity beyond nationality and politics, society and success. So, Happy Friendship Day. May you never lack for friends.
Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at www.parodevipictures.com
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