Anecdotes of Friendship

A really long time back, i woke up one day trying to recollect how i met my best friend in college.It made me smile remembering that very day, very moment and soon i realized i had a photographic memory. I started thinking about all the other close friends that i had made over the years and each one of my first day's with them had a beautiful story associated with it. Since then i really wanted to pen down my memories of them and now i am finally here doing it...:) I am glad i met them, i am glad that they would definetly be glad reading this when i send it across to them.

 I never believed in the term '3 am friends' which i read about in lifestyle magazines( which practically i would call 'gossip' magazines :) ), but you know what - i ve started to believe in it. I have a bunch of really good friends who i can turn to at any time of the hour and they would be there for me, and same with me. I would be there for them. There are a couple who have helped me during my really trying and testing times, with whom my friendship went through a sour phase and got back, and with whom the bond just got stronger as the years rolled by.They are all people who i ve know for easily more than 6 years now, each of them not necessarily knowing one another.

Going just by the psychological taxonomy of relationships, everyone has a pyramid of important people in their lives.The zenith of this pyramid is occupied by your immediate family with whom you have years of emotional bondage, and the next in the hierarchy would have all the other relationships-friends,relatives etc.That day i realized the occupants of my friendship pyramid and i was surprised that they all just came into my life without any invitations (;)) and have stuck on with me. I always think of myself as a very difficult person to deal with, but when i realized the number of good friends that occupied this pyramid of mine, i felt at ease :). To keep some mystery around the identities of who is who, i d like my friends to identify themselves from these anecdotes :). Not in any particular order so please don't assume your spots on the hierarchy ;)

Hug Machine :)

Lemme call this friend the hug machine :) why? very simple coz she showed me the power of a hug while we were in college. I was never the hugging kinds, but she had a recipe to overcome issues - a simple HUG :) I dont think i ve ever mentioned this to her, but i think she know s it herself.
She joined our class after trying her luck in Commerce and then finally decided that Science was what she could deal with in her life ;) Somehow the charisma of hers is this confusion that always surrounds her life :) Confusion is sort of synonymous to her. :)

I remember the day when we were having ice creams at Ice Thunder near college, and this really self proclaimed Mr.Cool comes upto us and asks 'Can you ladies tell us what are the happening place in Bangalore?'. So my hug machine gives him one nice stare from head to toe and just utters these lines ' For people like you, they made the Directory, go check it up' .His face turns pale, and I as usual  burst out laughing straight on his face :)Too bad Just Dial was not even born then ;)
Co incidentally, we both ended up studying in the same colleges pursuing different degrees, but somehow we still managed to survive our friendship. My hug machine is one tough nut, i wish i could borrow even half the emotional strength that she has dealing with soo many things in her life all through out. God knows how many litres of ice cream and coffee we ve consumed in our friendship but every memory of mine with her has always been either in an ice cream parlor or a coffee joint  or at each others homes where we used to catch up with each other, and pour our hearts out :) .And yes our many many trips to Vidyarthi Bhavan- we d never get bored of this one for sure :)We ve both matured a lot over the years and can very proudly say that she s my very good friend. She s been with me whenever i needed an ear to lighten my heart out of worries and i ve always been there.
My biggest problem with her is that she never keeps her promises :) She works on timeline worst than IST(Indian Stretchable Time) but i think she does it to console herself and keep herself occupied.Which i am ok with....
Bottom line- i love you dear and be the same strong person that you ve always been for me.

Smartie :)

This was the name i christened for her which sums her up totally.She s(was ;)) intelligent, padaaku, everyone's role model and a very grounded person.She was the one who bore all the torture of surviving engineering with a mad person called Shravani, and you know what she did real good at it. I can proudly say that i could survive the tough times at college only because i had Smartie with me then and vice-versa. She was my best friend in college and she still manages to be that even now. We ve gone through soo much together in college-spoke about soo many things-studies, boy talk , shallow girls, responsibilities, job...you name it. Just realised how over the years our topics of conversations have just moved on from kind to kind. In college it was all about which subjects to chose, who was a dependable person in class, then it went on to relationships (she was going through soo much then), went on to how to prepare for job interviews, to what next after work, and now on a more mature front responsibilities and complex relationships. We ve given each other soo much mental time that i am even surprised i ve spoken soo much to any one in my life...She s been there through my tough times, holding my hand and lending her ear when i needed it.Supports me on things which are good and always has a mind of her own to make her own judgments to tell me when i am wrong and when i am right. I just love her for that.Going through all that i have right now, she s been one of the people whose helped me understand that i am not wrong on some things that have happened.(i know she knows what i am talking about). She s the one whose seen and heard me cry, seen me helpless and lost. She s seen soo many facets of my personality that i feel she knows me well. She helped me pull myself from the bad spot i was and helped me along with a lot of other people to get back to who i was...the real me :) Thanks a lot Smartie...
Being the silly girl that i was in college, i ve troubled and pulled Smarties leg soo much that if friendships had divorce she would have applied for one with me :) There are soo many incidents that i wanna share about her. She still doesn remember how we met the first time. It was the 2nd sem lab externals (some programming lab crap), and she was waiting outside the lab for people to come in (back then she was clubbed with comp sci guys) and she sees me and comes up to me and introduces herself...hi i am ,....i was meant to be with u guys in info sci....ill be joining you all next sem....:)  
So she joins us next sem and as written in her fate she got stuck with me after this hilarious incident....
So this guy from XXXX college sends me a mail asking me about Mountaineering club of which i was actively part of. Surprisingly he voluntarily gives out personal information like -' I have my girlfriend in Info Science who told me about it...she s your classmate'...This gets my evil mind thinking :).....who could be this girl?? I used my analytical skills into picture and list out all girls who can and can not fall into the category of being taken....Somehow Smartie was a border line case and the only possibility of this guy's girlfriend, coz
a) she was a mystery girl who was'n with us the whole of last year
b) there was not much i knew about her to understand her personal life yet
c) she was soo pavum girl next door kinds that if this assumption of mine is wrong, i would be digging my own grave with a new girl in class....Weighed all my options and then thought...what the hell lets just let the bomb go :) I went up to her next day, sat next to her in class and passed a note which very vaguely had something like this in it "I think i know something about you but i am not sure if its correct or not"...she s like confused on this and asks me what it is...i pulled her aside coz by that time i had already attracted a lot of attention from other people( read DP :p)...and i confusingly told this-" i dont know but i think you have a guy and i think he from XXXX college"....her face was something to remember at that point...she was red ...with anger (courtesy her guy) and embarrassed (courtesy me)....she was ready to chop him off that evening on letting out this bit of personal detail to me who he doesn even know...and very embarrassed she admitted that its her....i felt a sense of cheap pride which i just cant explain here....i felt like Sherlock Holmes solving the greatest mystery on earth....:) I just laughed my heart out at that time. 
If it was anyone other then Smartie then that person would have vowed not to talk to me ever in their life again...but thats what Smartie is all about...one gem of a person, patient, appreciative, full of fun...we had our friendship go through some turbulence at the end of college but somehow we got back.I think she s the only person i have been successfully able to forgive and forget... something i ve learnt from her...I love you dear :)

When i think back at it, just realized God has his own scheme of things where accidental meeting turns into a long bond of meaningful friendships.God has it all planned in his diary he has for everyone of us called our 'fate' and how he intertwines it with each other.