60 and running...still!

Ten years to go to hit 60 years. But this is my 60th post. No, I'm not trying to make an issue of it, just been thinking of it and thought I may as well write stuff down, blog it you know?

Random thoughts bring me to friends. Who are friends? How do they fit into my scheme of things, my life? One gets all these rotten emails telling me to forward it to other friends I have, including the one who sent it to me, failing which I shall not have the luck and/or fortune that is predicted in those emails. The folks who send me such mails are really way down in my list of friends. They are people I can do without. They are the people I can cadge a drink or meal off every few years or so, laugh about the silliness we may have experienced together some time in the past and then move on.

I can see friends, the really good ones, including those I've never met, but are in touch with on the mail, are the ones who want to genuinely share with me. They want to share my joys and sorrows, my mundane news or my important things, and do it all without judgement. I'm lucky to have such friends. Because that's the way I share with them as well.

Being friends seems to be a political thing to me these days. Somehow there's an ulterior motive to "being friends" with someone. I have friends, not many, just a few, with whom I can spend hours very comfortably, and not have more than ten sentences of conversation with them. There are others who claim friendship, and it's only later that I realise they have used me for some gain from which I never benefited. Which of course includes this real friendship that I'm talking about. Like there's this "friend" who got me to do a voice-over for a film he was making on his own money. Yet the instant he got himself a big sponsor, a Japanese television company no less, he began to avoid me, and now I hear he's finished editing it and still no word from him.

Or take the other guy who needed me to work with him on an advertising-cum-marketing deal. In fact after our first meeting with the client, he even went so far as to tell me that the client expressed interest in giving him the business because of my off-the-cuff presentation and my knowledge of computers and the internet and how all that fitted in with the client's requirement. After many such meetings, discussions and brainstorming sessions, I asked him whether it would be possible to get some money for the time I'd spent on this, (not the entire money he was willing to give me once he got paid by the client), but just a bit so that I would not feel frustrated or demotivated. Since then he's not even bothered to call me, someone who would earlier speak to me almost 3 or 4 times a day. I hear he's got the business now but somehow I haven't fitted into his scheme of things.

But it's okay. All these years have given me an insight into the human psyche which I'm consciously aware of, and yet, even though I fall for sob stories quite sure of their inevitable result, I still go ahead and do it. If for no money, at least to keep my mind stimulated, and to keep motivating myself that I have the wherewithal to continue in the direction I have given myself.

So friends... who are they really? I know I have some, and I'm happy with them.