Friendshipping philosophy

10 Things I Hate About Me is a book by Randa Abdel-fattah in which a teenage girl named Jamilah gets an email from a mysterious someone named John, whom she then goes on to have a whole string of amazing conversations and deepest-darkest-secret exchanges with. This is only one of the things that happens in the book, but it was also the most fascinating.
At 13, I sat up all night, clutching it close to my heart, consumed by the mere thought of having beautiful conversations with complete strangers on the internet. The one thing my mother warned me about. What was it about strangers on the internet that I found so magical when Amma kept talking about 50 year old men pretending to be 18? I think now that, like many things in my life at that time, it was less about them and more about me.

Because it worked both ways. If I didn’t know who they were, they didn’t know who I was. I could literally be anyone I wanted to be! I could be funny and flirt and have conversations I was way too nervous to ever carry through in person, I could be rude the way I can never be to someone’s face.

My character was in my hands.

When people talk about Alexander McCall-Smith, they often talk about the №1 Ladies Detective Agency but actually his Sunday Philosophy Club series makes for a much, much better read. A lot more nuanced and perceptive, it is filled with little observations and characters that differ significantly from each other in ways more peculiar than the bold, cut-outs that the loveable Mma Ramotswe and Makutsi are. The only thing that’s really wrong with the Sunday Philosophy Club is Isabel Dalhousie’s name because Isabel is such a young, pretty girl name and Dalhousie is so old man and blah that they really do not go together at all. But we can do very little about the names we are given.

The point here is that somewhere along the way, Isabel Dalhousie makes an interesting distinction between Personality and Character. The former, she says, is something we’re born with, a psychology phenomena we have little conscious control over. The latter is more philosophical. It’s up to us what kind of character we want to be. The way we’re brought up doesn’t influence our character itself, it influences what kind of characteristics we value or desire.
Isabel stopped her speculation somewhere before this, but I am going to entertain it for a little longer.

Character in other words, is the person we want to be rather than the person we are. So when you friend someone, are you friending the person they want to be or the person they are, for some reason or the other, unable to not be?

At 13, 14, 16 and 17 it was mandatory to have a best friend (15 is excluded because that’s the cool age when you think you’re above everything mandatory). Mine was always Arun.
Yet it was never really a choice. We’ve known each other since we were born, our fathers were batchmates in college, our families kept in touch even when we didn’t want to and every weekend we’d meet and hang out simply because it was better than sitting in silence while the parents talked. When Arun moved away to Design school in Coimbatore, when I settled into college and finally found (for the first time in my otherwise homeschooled existence) friends who were not family friends, I thought we didn’t have to keep in touch anymore. I thought we’d drift apart, that we may meet once or twice when she came back to visit because we were still technically speaking, “friends”. I thought it would all be naam ke vaaste.

Because the fact was that Arun and I would never have chosen to be friends.

That’s the difference between friends and family I suppose, you choose one and have absolutely no choice with the other. Yet Arun and I keep in touch because we need to…strangely. For no real reason apart from the fact that we know each in a way that comes not from what we’ve said or shared, but simply from the time we’ve spent together.

Is that what matters then, time?
Is that what determines, ultimately, how well a person knows you?

Pop songs are like people from the Victorian Era. They’re obsessed with the idea of originality and facades and I grew up listening to them. To people singing about their “other side”, to lyrics like “I let you see the parts of me that weren’t all that pretty”, and I wondered if everyone really had so many parts to them. It was one thing when Hannah Montana said she lived two lives but when Kelly Clarkson asked her man to love her “even with her dark side” and to “remind” her who she “really was”… I didn’t quite get it.

I grew up a little and thought ok, maybe it was just a white people thing. Teenagers in America have issues and they talk about it a lot. It’s okay if you don’t have any issues, just say you’re Indian and that your parents won’t allow for it.

Then I grew up a little more and began to watch people. The word Watch makes it creepy but what I mean is to think about. To pause when people say something or behave a certain way and think, hey why are you doing or saying this? Who are you trying to be? It’s a lot easier to try to understand what someone else is, than it is to understand the same about yourself.

On the night we had our 12th grade graduation party, the night a group of us slept over at a friend’s place and stayed up talking, I found my “squad”. It’s kind of depressing because that was our last day of school and it would have been great if it’d happened about a year or two earlier but well… at least I found it. We played a game that day where each of us took turns going through a “burn” during which everyone got to reveal exactly what they thought about each other. From first-day impressions to end-of-two-years ka grand revelation.
It was brutal. It was beautiful. It blew my mind.

What my school friends said was not even close to what Arun would have said. What my college friends say would never match with what my badminton class friends say. Does the fact that I’m a different person in the company of different people make me fake? Or is it just different sides of me that each of them see.

“Life will be happier for the on-line individual, because those with whom one interacts most strongly will be selected more by commonality of interests and goals than by accidents of proximity” — this is well known psychologist and computer scientist, J.C.R. Licklider imagining the internet in 1968.

It’s such a brilliant way to put it. Accidents of Proximity?? How often I have felt trapped by it! That sense of “Dammit! there’s no one in this part of the world who gets me”. That wishful thinking that drives my love for fantasy worlds in which Sensates exists and Subtle Knives can be used to carve Windows into parallel universes. All those pop songs that talk about sending out Fireworks and Flares to tell people across the city that hey you’re not alone… even if everyone around you (every accident of proximity) seems to make you feel like an odd one out.

Tinder.
“Commonality of interests”?
Twitter. Instagram. SoundCloud. WhatsApp.

Once when my brother was 9 years old he came home from Judo class all bubbling and excited about a new friend of his. “Which school is he in?” we asked, but Ishaan said something vague and giggled through his story of how they threw each other around on the floor and played football and raced to climb the rope. “Is he your age? Does he stay close by?” we asked and Ishaan jumped off the bed to show us how this new friend tackled their teacher. “What’s his naame?!” we asked in exasperation and finally 9 year old Ishaan said “Aiyoo, we don’t talk about such things okaay.”

Why do you need these silly details, he seemed to ask, when there’s so much else to talk about! And that was exactly what I felt, a few years later at 16 when, having found a playlist on 8tracks so wonderful and perfect, I launched into conversation with its creator. Not knowing if this person was a he or a she or a child or an uncle or an Indian, Norwegian or any kind of person at all! We liked the same kind of music and that was all that mattered.

An absolute stranger. A friend.

Once upon a time, when I was but a hot-headed 12 year old steeped in burning desire to break free of homeschooling and Make More Friends, a family friend asked me why I couldn’t just be happy with one. “Why do you need so many?” he asked in that uncle way and I think today, I have something of an answer. As kids we were always on the lookout for a “best friend forever”; the complete friend, the friend for life. It’s such a heavyweight title it seems too much to ask of just one person now.

Be nice, be stern, give advice and take mine, share secrets and treasure mine, listen, make me comfortable but keep me curious, be the person I can talk to about everything. How demanding we can be. How high our expectations and in consequence, how fragile. If you’ve found a friend who fits this bill, congratulations you’ve achieved the impossible and I am happy for you. Truly.
But I’ve never seen a friendship work that way. Heraclitus famously said that one can never step into the same river twice and I think the same is true of friendships.

When I joined college two years ago, it was filled with strangers. Today, I have more friends here than I ever hoped to have and I don’t mean this in an “I am friends with everyone but connect with no one and am eternally alone” sort of way. I just don’t expect everything from one group anymore. When A and I hang out, I play listener and simply hear her out, when B and I hang out, I’m the one who talks. My lovelife is C’s business, my fights with family are D’s, my talk of confused sexuality is E’s and my interest in politics is G’s. My thrill at the sudden renewed thought of going abroad is shared with H, my musing about education with I. My desire to be quite simply comfortable is A’s again, and my desire to hold conversation with someone I know nothing about belongs to the JKLM’s of the online realm. I dance with N, wear pink with O, laugh with P and eat biryani with Q. (Alphabets of my life, you know who you are).

It’s not that these spheres of interest and connection never mix or overlap, they do. But they don’t have to.

So chill.

And enjoy the waves.