Gerald D'Cunha

  “Not all friends know they have lost you.” Joyce Rachelle   S o, today is the ‘Friendship Day’. I am not going to greet my best friends – ‘A Happy Friendship Day, dost ’. Nor I am going to get   greetings from them. Frankly, like you, I, too, have a very, very few friends who have been there in all weathers – in good times and bad times. As we all know, we do not need to go singing along the village streets – “Yeh dosti, hum kabhi nahi thodenge’… Kabhi nahi thodenge? Come on! Life is real, not reel. In real life, Gandhis and Bachchans breakaway… Amitabh Bachchan, Amar Singh and Anil Ambani can never declare to the world: “Khana peena saath hai/Marna jeena saath hai/Saari zindagi” Come on friend, let’s be real! I have had plenty of friends through out my 63 years of life. Like you, a few – very, very few – have been around in good weathers and bad weathers, both. If I express by bitterness over many of my friends not being around – and call them ‘fair-weath...

I have had many, many friends all along these years. My school friends, church friends, college friends, work-place friends, students-turned-friends, neighbours-turned-friends, friends’-friends-turned-friends, foes-turned-friends, relatives-turned-friends, social-media friends… yes, all sorts. Who are my true friends? I think, that’s a stupid question. I will never, ever find an answer to that question. For, I really do not know whose true friend I really am! Can I be brutally honest and declare, that, for so and so friend of mine, I am ready to do anything, anytime, anywhere… all the way through… in his most difficult times and in his most glorious times… Yes, can I say this without expecting from him anything? Can I do it for him despite getting hurt from him often? Despite his occasional indifference and insensitivity? I am afraid, I do not have any friend in my life, for whom I will lay my own life. Yes, I have many, many friends, though… and, yes, I hav...