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.

The point is, even if we haven’t seen one another’s mugs for a decade, or heard their voices, if I am in some sort of trouble, I can always turn to these guys, and they would help me in whatever way they can, without asking a question.

Without asking a question. True friendship, I really believe, is based on a total refusal to judge the other person. A friend of mine’s only extra-curricular interest lies in paid-for sex, but he is a true friend, and I would never judge him on that. I wouldn’t lecture him, criticise him, avoid him. As he wouldn’t me, for my bad habits.

Even stronger friendships are forged in undergraduate hostels (I keep harping about hostels because most of my friends are from the hostels I stayed in. This is not to imply that you can’t develop deep friendships if you lived with your parents). There, you are even younger, and you are making the transition from boys to men, or girls to women. Your characters are being shaped, and unconsciously you imbibe a lot of traits and values from others around you, just as your quirks or beliefs infect them. A Singapore-based friend of mine, who I hadn’t met for a decade, called me up once after seeing the cover of a magazine that I was working for. “This cover picture is your idea,” he said. It was. He knew me.

Two friends of mine, Susant and Bubun, have been meeting every Sunday at 7 p.m. at Bubun’s home for the last 20 years. If I am in Kolkata on a Sunday evening, no one has to be forewarned, I just ring the bell, and they are there, and there’s Old Monk. No one asks any personal questions, but there is no bar on anyone speaking about deeply personal things. No one judges anyone. An unspoken covenant guides and rules.

Isn’t friendship much more complex than love? I believe so. It is never unrequited, yet it needs no physical proximity. No one needs to speak of it, or affirm it, in fact, no one needs to think about it at all. One doesn’t, actually. This column is a waste of space. When you have a friend, you know.

Sandipan Deb is the editor of RPG Enterprises’ soon-to-be launched weekly features and current affairs magazine, Open.

sandipandeb@yahoo.co.uk