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Kindred spirits

What is a friend? A single soul dwelling in two bodies.” The Greek Philosopher Aristotle is said to have uttered this pearl of wisdom as he pondered the true meaning of friendship, and its importance in enriching our lives. Soulful friendships have been celebrated in all cultures. The friendship between Shri Krishna and Sudhama is cited to this day.

Karna and Duryodhana are another pair of bosom friends in the Mahabharata. Duryodhana shielded the brave Karna from taunts due to his low birth, and gave him a small kingdom to govern. Out of friendship and gratitude, Karna supported Duryodhana with his life during the battle of Kurukshetra. In the Bible, King Saul’s son Jonathan gave up his claim to the throne of Israel, supported David as the future king, and risked his own life to protect David from King Saul’s murderous intentions.

True friendships aren’t just myths and legends. They can happen in real life as well. Great friendships in more recent times have led to brilliant collaborations and benefited the world. Rabindranath Tagore and the Irish poet William Butler Yeats came from divergent cultures. But they appreciated each other’s genius.

They considered themselves as poetic spokespersons for their respective homelands, which were at that time under the subjugation of England. Deeply moved by Tagore’s poems, Yeats supported his entry into English literary circles. Tagore discussed his English translation of the Gitanjali with Yeats, and accepted some of Yeats’s suggestions. Both poets later went on to earn the Nobel Prize for literature.

Aristotle’s ideal is a far cry from these trying times of dissolving family ties and rising divorce rates. Sharing deepest hopes and fears and loyalty till the last breath seems impossible. Too often, siblings squabble over family property, childhood buddies claw each other to climb the corporate ladder, and spouses are rarely soulmates. For most of us in today’s fast-paced world, friendships are little more than superficial arrangements of mutual convenience. We are called upon to network with too many people, while our time and energy is limited.

How many of us can manage to be on more than hi-bye terms with colleagues in other departments, or hundreds of college classmates? Yet we confidently list them among our circle of friends. We maintain a casual cordiality as long as circumstances compel us to interact with them, but the connection fades when someone moves away. For rat-race weary souls like us, it’s a herculean task to spare time and effort to nurture loving life-long friendships.

In tune with the times?

In a society driven by social media, quantity rules at the cost of quality. Perhaps friendships are shifting from the real to the hyper-connected virtual world. But where everyone has a thousand Facebook friends, how does one ever keep track of them all? Dunbar’s number is a recent finding of social science, which holds that people are not emotionally and intellectually geared to effectively deal with a social circle much greater than 150 people.

Days and even lifetimes can be spent following countless ‘friends’ on umpteen social networking sites like Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Google Plus, Tumblr, Instagram and more. But how intimately do we know any of them? Dunbar’s number rules, and these ‘friendships’ are tenuous at best. Even relatively serious sites like LinkedIn facilitate superficial connecting. Computer prompts on birthdays, promotions and anniversaries generate template congratulatory messages. Sometimes you wonder who exactly you are wishing, and for what. So, isn’t social media creating only an illusion of friendship?

Smartphone in hand, we conscientiously check the second-to-second updates of countless virtual friends, even while crossing a busy road or on a hot date. In all sincerity, we never miss the dear kitty’s latest antics or fail to praise the humongous globs resulting from our friends’ culinary efforts. Yet, what is the outcome? The silliest images and posts grab hundreds of ‘likes’ and comments. But important life-changing events can go unnoticed. A friend shared how his new profile picture showing his tonsured head drew much flak from his friends. Everyone complained that the new style, no matter how trendy, did not suit him at all. Sadly, nobody noticed or cared to learn the real cause. He had shaved his head upon performing the last rites of his father.

Closely linked networks of friends who all knew each other, were normal in the past. They all came to know when a friend needed help. Whether out of genuine goodness of heart, or just because everyone else was doing it, people tended to support others within their group. Migration has been a part of the human experience since prehistoric times. Even till recent times, when people moved away from their homes in search of better opportunities, they were forced to loosen ties with their old communities.

They were compelled to focus upon building close-knit friendships and support bases among the new community, and replaced one circle of close friends with a new circle. Thanks to technology and social media, we can now carry all our friends from the past in our pockets. Remaining in touch with childhood, school and college friends, old neighbours and former colleagues, is a wonderful thing. Far from destroying friendships, social networks actually help to prolong the connections. But these same dear people help bloat up our endless list of online friends. When the list grows very long, we cannot give any of them the close attention that they deserve. As a result, the intensity of all our friendships gets diluted. While technology attempts to connect all of us in endless networks in cyberspace, we have never been so alone.

Hope on the horizon

“You don’t get to 500 million friends without making a few enemies,” goes the blurb for a recent movie on social media. Danger lurks in the virtual world of quick and easy friendships. Careless innocents can get trapped into confrontations with trolls and stalkers. Personal information can get misused and one can become a social media addict. Relationships are announced and casually broken with online posts, often causing public embarrassment and heartbreak at the callousness of it all. Yet, if used with due caution and self-control, social media can be an incredible boon. We can beat doomsday fears of humanity mutating into a bleary-eyed horde glued to flashing screens, incapable of productive interpersonal relationships with other real people.

Sincere, positive, soul-sharing friendships can also happen in the virtual world. Social networks can empower us by offering wider choices and a broader perspective. It’s up to us to choose our friends, and what we share with them. Technology now offers more places to find those friends. Well-chosen friendships can enrich our lives and broaden our perspectives.

Genuine friends are as uncommon in the virtual world as they are in reality. But if we seek, we may be lucky enough to find that rare pearl on a sandy beach. After all, those electronic images and messages are being generated by real people. Just because we cannot see and touch them doesn’t mean they do not exist. I’ve made several precious friends in online writers’ workshops, which double as social networks for the literarily inclined. We have encouraged each other to refine our work and spread our wings. Our online collaborations have resulted in books and web-based literary journals.


Veterans like me who made close friends in cyberspace in the dawn of the social networking era will remember virtual hangouts like Rediff Chat, Orkut and Yahoo Messenger. I enjoyed freewheeling chats with friends who logged in from Pune, Delhi, Boston, Spain and other places, far from my own home in Bengaluru. Our chatroom identities such as Rastafarian, UTurn, Helen of Troy and Flying Cockroach left a lot to the imagination and added to the fun.

As for the depth and substance of these friendships, how can I forget the ladies from Spain who introduced me to authors as rich and varied as Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Terry Pratchett? We consoled each other through workday blues, and I counselled a young friend through her teething problems in a new marriage. Some of us later met in real life, and a few of my most precious friendships spanned over decades. When Yahoo Messenger shut down recently, a friend shared how she met her husband there. Fun online chats across continents drew them closer. They met, Cupid’s arrows flew, and now they are happily married with delightful children.

Outstanding friendships of yore are celebrated because they were rare exceptions. Humanity has always been a hotchpotch of opportunists, scholars, idiots, cheats, pacifists, violent criminals and saints. Thieves’ honour is morally dubious, but such friendships too have always existed. Before we dismiss today’s social connections as selfish and opportunistic, we could remember the friends in Aesop’s time-honoured fable.

Chased by an angry bear, two friends desperately sought shelter. One friend climbed up a tree, abandoning his less agile friend down below to deal with the bear. People and friendships have never been perfect, but wonderful connections have also happened to inspire us. Let us celebrate the spirit of true friendship, and use our discretion in choosing our companions. Let us keep our hearts and minds open, and when we find that rare true friend, let us shower affection and trust in return.