New age friends

 

New age friends

My teenage son, due to an infection in his spinal code, is under bed rest. Getting confined to bed at this age is not the best thing to happen. Covid had forced him to be inhouse for almost a year. Before he could enjoy the brief freedom provided by the lull period, he is back to bed

Like any father I was worried how he will manage the situation. To my surprise, he took it bravely and positively. But during this period I noticed something which made me write this. None of his friends from our housing society came to meet him. We live in this society for more than a decade and he has quiet a number of friends here. He is not an introvert and is quiet sociable. Even his classmates visited just once.

I was bit concerned and asked him why no one is visiting. He, nonchalantly, shrugged off my concern.  He said, as far as the friends at the housing society are concerned, the boundaries are well defined. You meet, play, share a joke, celebrate festivals and spend time together. However, very rarely they cross the lines of your personal life. They are, without any confusion, able to separate their personal and social lives. Unless you allow them to enter your private life, they will never trespass. For him there is no one worth enough in society to be identified as a real friend . Such is the clarity.

Things are slightly different with school friends. There are many with whom he shares his deepest feelings; a selected few for whom he has opened his otherwise shut door. But, that does not mean that they have to visit him frequently. Interestingly, they are constantly in touch, albeit through a virtual world. Literally every minute they are connected over various gadgets and whenever they want to meet they just have to  switch on the video. It is not that they don’t meet but meetings are mainly with a purpose. Personal meetings are few and far between. They do not need the physical reassurance to feel comfortable. Emotion is not their weak spot. Of course they have their strong emotions. But they hardly carry it on their sleeves. It is mostly reserved to their deeper self and seldom exhibited. At least that is what I feel and I should admit that I have badly failed to fathom their innards . Nevertheless, in a way which is completely alien to us they share their feelings and emotions. He is least bothered if no one is coming to visit him when he is ill and he is not even feeling their absence. In fact they are there with him always, at the press of a finger.

I felt it strange because my idea of friendship is totally different. I thought of those days when we could not think of not meeting our friends even for a day. If someone is not feeling well, then you are promptly by his/her side immediately. We kind of take over his/her responsibility, much more than the family. That may be because we had no other means to express our care and concern. In an electronic era we also would have behaved in this way. Even then it is no denying the fact that we still need that physical presence of our friends besides us. For us friends were not just virtual. They were more real, in flesh and blood.

Like many other things in our life ,friendship too, is probably evolving. You can decide not to visit someone who is bedbound for many days and still claim to be his friend. Even the person on bed don’t find anything amiss in it. May be they are more comfortable with the virtual presence than the real presence.

What I still relish are those days when my friends used to barge into my place. Though at times disturbing, their constant presence was really comforting. So I kept wishing he too had few friends who could drop in once in a while. He repeatedly assures me that he is fine with his friends not visiting him. Still, every time the door bell rings I wish it will be one of his friends, who at last decided to spend some time with him. Thus is the frailty of a fathers mind.