Friends

Sometimes I wonder why we make friends and why is there are a need to make friends. No doubt, humans are social beings. Beyond food, work and basic necessities, there is a need to connect to society in some way or another. How does a child start making friends? I remember when I was 5-6 years old, I had a lot of friends in my neighborhood. These were kids I used to play with in the evening. And yes, I always used to look forward to these evenings. We all used to get dressed up and come down to the park below our house to play. Sometimes we used claps or whistles as signals to invite other kids to come down. We then used to decide on the game we wanted to play. It was a variety of games ranging from pitthhooo, where 7 marbles were kept one on top of the other and hit with a ball,to chhupan chhupai, where we used to hide in the stairways and behind trees. Kho kho, cricket, cards, ludo , snakes and ladders, badminton, stapooo were some other games. I also had friends in my class, and we always used to fight to sit together in class. The teachers made many unsuccessful attempts to separate friends.. . however, we managed to get together during lunch to share our tiffins. I remember I had a south indian friend in school , Pavi, who used to get delicious idlis and dosas in her lunch box and all of us waited for her to open her box...
As we changed class and moved, I also lost some of my old friends. In class tenth, I chose Science, while some of my friends went for Commerce or Arts. Ours ways got separated. I got busy with my practicals and preparation to excel in class. Some of my neighborhood friends also got busy with studies and competitive exams. We shifted house and I lost most of my neighborhood friends as distances increased and lives got busier. School friends moved out of cities, contacts changed, some moved out of the country.
I moved to college which seemed like a passing phase. Most people find their college days to be the most important and enjoyable days of their life. Somehow, I do not have any fond memories, or to put it better, any memories of my graduation days. They were long, boring and exhaustive. In fact, I found my post graduation days, among the really golden years of my student life. North campus in Delhi University has a different feel altogether. The long hours of sitting under the tree doing nothing were fun.. spending all the time "not attending classes" was fun..coming to the campus dot on time but deciding at the nth hour that this class is not worth attending was fun..Made really good friends....However, life moves on...
I got a job soon and life changed tremendously. It wasn't the same anymore. Life now revolved around money and targets. It was tied up ... Soon I was out of touch with most friends. Made some new ones in my office.,...
Time moved on, I sometimes feel life is like a train... u keep on passing the landscape .. where you see and experience something for sometime and then it passes by and a new landscape comes. There are some stations where the train halts for sometime, but then moves on towards its destination. There are some people who manage to remain in touch with friends forever. I do not know but somehow, I am different in this respect... I get over this easily with time. People who were important in life at some point have moved on and that place has been taken by others. Somehow, with time, I stop missing any of the old folks. It feels great to connect with them sometimes over social networking sites, however, priorities change with time.....