Last fortnight I wrote about a recently-passed-away friend. Since then, questions about friendship have been lodged in a corner of my mind. What is true friendship really, if there is such a thing?

What one knows for sure is that there are different classes of friends. There are fairweather friends, there are drinking buddies who are not true friends, true friends who are also drinking buddies, and so on. I, for myself, take the word “friend” very seriously, and use it very infrequently. I possibly consider 15 people to be my friends, in the sense that I believe they are true friends. Strangely enough, a majority of them I have not met for many years, maybe even a decade. These people are scattered all over the world, and we are in sporadic e-mail contact. About eight years ago, one of them took the trouble to set up a yahoogroup for us to meet and chat (we had all been together in business school two decades ago). The first four years, there was frenetic activity on the site, with some people posting three or four times a day. But then, as we got more or more involved in the business of life, activity on the site came down to a trickle. Yet, I believe nothing has changed between us.

The reason. As young men, we lived in the same hostel, and when you are living 24/7 with a bunch of people, there’s no way you can pretend to be something you are not. You will be found out. In those two years, we saw one another in all sorts of circumstances: under terrible stress, in love, in failed love, proud achievements, performance in extremely competitive situations. We saw one another take ethical decisions. We knew one another, and today, at the very least, we know what we were when we were young. And when we meet each other physically or on the Net, we revert to what we were in those days. Sometimes even the lingo and slang of those years come back into our conversation. As persons, we may be quite different today, but we are different based on the foundation of that time.

... contd.