“A good friend knows all your stories. A best friend helped you create them.”
This article marks the beginning of the third year of the blog that started on a whim on a cold winter night in December 2020. I want to mark the coming year with a celebration of friendship. I am very fortunate to have many good friends and these 4 being the friends for the longest time; the longest is 50 years old.
We have shared our trials and tribulations, joys and celebrations, and partook in many adventures and some misadventures too. We have reduced the art of being a good friend to science, to be honest.
One of the characteristics of our friendship and in fact, it is true with all my other friends from my university days, has been our ability to connect as if we met the day before, despite the frequency of interactions.
The above was taken on a cruise celebrating our long friendship since 1976. Though some friends are missing in the photo, it was still a memorable trip.
As we embark upon another year, I want to share with you, how important these and other friendships have been in my life, all of them have been with me, and for me at some point in my life or the other, celebrating my joys and victories, supporting me in times of my need.
I am truly blessed with having so many wonderful people in my life, including proxies as in the above image, Pratima, Uno represented by Baby G, Franck Ergas represented by his (by all means) better half, Naida, and of course missing are Purnima and Saras. Ergas family and us have been friends for more than 2 decades and we have become a family. It was such an honor and privilege for our family to have been part of their family Christmas lunch. Mind you, we were not invited guests, but we were family.
I am so blessed and fortunate to have so many friends including numerous friends I made during my working life and who have remained dear to me all these years. As I see it, we don’t have a choice in picking who our family is, but certainly a choice in picking who our friends are going to be, and it is an artform to have them become your family. They are as precious as our family, if not more, for one simple reason: we picked them, and they picked us.
As I read somewhere that “You can always tell when two people are best friends because they’re always having way more fun than it makes sense for them to be having.” You can imagine the fun I have when we meet. Wishing all of you a very happy new year and humbly seeking your encouragement and support as I embark upon my third year of this blog.
I will conclude this article with a toast to all my friends: “There are good ships. There are wood ships. Ships that sail the sea. But the best ships are the friendships. May they always be.”
