Adulterated
As I grow older something’s seem to get easier and some more difficult.
One of the things that got more difficult was making friends.
From the time I was in Kindergarten till I left school, friendships were spontaneous, effortless and uninhibited. Friendship was joyful and genuine.
It mattered not whether they were rich or poor, or what religious beliefs their parents held.
My play partners, companions and friends mostly enjoyed my company and I theirs. Disagreements took place all the time, but were quickly forgiven and more readily forgotten. Fights may have left scars on the body but not in the heart. I wanted for nothing, and we shared what we had willingly.
I remember that in the ninth grade I left boarding school to become a day scholar in the same Bishop School.
A great pleasure for me was, at each weekend cycling from home to school carrying a large quantity of tasty Parathas prepared by my Aunt for my famished boarding school friends.
I had even forgotten about this until my friend Abbas reminded me recently.
In college it was still easy making friends. Friendships were still born out of the voice of the heart but I also started using a bit of my brain.
Exposure to new and wicked pleasures normally numbed the mind.
Once the novelty wore off, I made a new set of friends. These were people I had developed a healthy respect for. These were folks who challenged me to make me a better person. Many still remain good friends
Being a Punjabi and a Sikh, we are used to being jovial, big hearted, and a little crazy. I like to believe I have a good sense of humour, a large encyclopaedia of jokes. These are all the ingredients to be popular and to make friends.
I realised soon enough that humour is a great thing, particularly if you can laugh at yourself.
Once I was working professionally befriending people was easy, after all I had become practised at it. However the friendships were often less than genuine. Hidden agendas with manipulation and exploitation often overshadowed genuine likings. At this stage befriending people with a view to exploiting them is understood and accepted. Maybe it’s a social thing.
During the most dynamic period of my career genuine friendships mostly eluded me. Many ‘friends’ were customers and professional associates.
The period when I work hard I liked to party hard. Party animals, and partners in vice were the preferred ‘friends’.
Here is a question;
What is the difference between men and boys?
‘The cost of their toys”.
When you party too hard or are having too much fun it begins to bother your parents. My parents wanted to get me married at the earliest.
Dad kept saying that youth in the heart and body, time on hand and money in the pocket was a recepie for trouble
I kept refusing to get married until I met Mohini, then I was hooked.
They say ‘A man is incomplete until he gets married, then he is finished.’
After marriage, making friends got extremely complex, marital couples have to be normally friendly in pairs. Rules of friendship at this stage are formal and are confusing.
I soon learnt that the visas for my bachelor friends to my home were cancelled. This was inevitable because they had distractive and inappropriate tendencies like getting inebriated, and running wild and speaking the truth.
Hey! Boys will be boys, doesn’t cut it here at this stage.
As our children grew up all the pair friends were the parents of our children’s classmates. This is a passing phase and has no real impact in most cases. However, some become so dear that they are still considered as part of our family.
Once I had achieved some degree of professional success, I began to think no end of myself. I could not enjoy genuine friendships.
Isn’t that a shame that material success often makes people so pompous and often insecure?
I thought a lot about these things and decided to put down my thoughts to paper (computer really).
• Why do we change?
• Why do we stop trusting, loving or befriending?
I like many others bandy about terms without really pausing to think what they really mean. What did I understand by the term friendship?
Putting on an act of being someone else is pretty exhausting. Deception is often short lived and corrodes the soul gradually and certainly.
In my dictionary, ‘A friend’ is someone with whom you can be yourself.
I found an interesting correlation between age that is becoming an adult and getting adulterated. I believed I was getting less pure with age.
I looked up the dictionary and found the meaning of the words ‘adult’ and ‘adulterated’.
Adult comes from the Latin word ‘adultus’ meaning grown up.
Adulterated from the Latin word ‘adulterare’ meaning to corrupt.
The more I aged the more adulterated I became.
What caused this corruption (or adulteration)?
I wonder if any of you have thoughts on this.
