Long Distance Friendships

I have always been closest to the friends who've been with me since school. These are the friends I've always valued the most. Until the time we finished our graduation, most of us were still in Delhi and we used to meet up often. Now almost everybody is in a different city. One is in a different continent. I'm the only one who's stuck around in Delhi all through. Everybody else has either worked or studied (or both) in at least one other city at some point of time during the eight years since we all finished school. I guess Pavitra was the first one... she went to Pune for her engineering. The rest of us all did our undergraduate studies in Delhi. Of all the friends I am still in touch with, Pavitra is the one I've known the longest. Eighteen or nineteen years, I think. This was in a day and age when cellphones were not all that popular with us. So you know, it wasn't all that easy to make long distance calls whenever one felt like it. We managed to keep in touch mainly over mail and IM. A little over three years later, Aditi went to Hyderabad to take up a job. This was a time when I'd started to feel rather weird about it all... Aditi was already a design graduate and about to take up a job. Everybody else would be a fully qualified engineer in another year's time. I was already a graduate, and had almost lost all sense of direction about what to do next with my life. Because my life was not taking me where I'd originally intended for it to. So I was all confused. Even more so owing to the fact that everybody else seemed to have a clear direction of where they were going, and seemed to be going exactly where they'd originally intended to. Adi always wanted to be a designer, as far back as I could remember. And our own Laurel (a.k.a. Sumit) and Hardy (a.k.a. Gullu, or sometimes Nikhil) had always apparently been very serious about being engineers. Ditto for Doodlee (a.k.a. Shashank) and Jayant, who were among the biggest geeks known to mankind.

Coming back from the digression, it was a short while after Sumit finished his engineering and left for Mysore that I finally got myself a cellphone and got into the habit of calling him, Adi and Pav fairly frequently. I'd actually been quite apprehensive about how well we'd be able to keep in touch at the time when Sumit was leaving Delhi. Because he'd been the friend I'd usually go to when there was something bothering me and I needed a guy's perspective on it. Quite often, he still is. My apprehensions were put to rest the day after he landed in Mysore and we had a nice chat over Yahoo which made me feel that I'd manage. I'd cope with the miles separating me from my three closest friends.

Since then, Doodlee left for Hyderabad. Jayant for Bangalore. Gullu shuttled between Mumbai and Pune and Delhi. Pav moved to Chennai, and back to Pune. Adi came back to Delhi and then went to Jaipur and is now in Delhi again. Sumit went to Bangalore and then to Perth and then again to Bangalore and then to Melbourne. And I'm still here. Never worked outside the National Capital Region.

I had two amazing trips visiting my friends in different cities. In April 2006 I visited Doodlee in Hyderabad, where Sumit also joined us. I had the loveliest time over there. This was just after I finished my internship, so I had a little money from the stipend I got during the internship. And it was just before I took up my first job, so I had a little time on my hands. It was a good feeling, financing my own flight tickets and going that far from home all by myself for the first time. Doodlee was a wonderful host and showed us around really nicely. I saw a whole bunch of places, ranging from the Microsoft campus to Ramoji Film City, which hosts a bunch of sets used in various Bollywood movies. We had an amazing weekend, with the three of us staying up till 5 AM and chatting and still managing to get up at 7 AM and spend the entire day sightseeing without falling asleep at the Charminar :D.

And then there was New Year's 2007 which I celebrated in Jaipur when Adi was there. I'd spent all my life in Delhi and had never once visited Jaipur before that. I'd never seen the Hawa Mahal, or the Johari Bazaar (it's a very different experience, shopping for jewellery with a jewellery designer by your side :-) ), or the Nahargarh and Amer forts. I'd never before (or afterwards, for that matter) watched a Hollywood movie dubbed in Hindi. We spent some part of New Year's Eve watching Night At The Museum in Hindi. We had a ridiculously good time watching Ben Stiller hum a Himesh Reshammiya number. On that trip I injured both my feet in multiple places, including a pretty serious injury on one of my toes which was quite horrific. Since then history has repeated itself multiple times and I have developed a strong tendency to injure/sprain/fracture my feet. Thankfully they all healed pretty quickly and I was left with the happy memories.

There's a Pune trip and a Bangalore trip still on my to do list. Possibly one of them will materialize during this year's shutdown. Sumit wanted me to add Melbourne to this list. But I guess I'm waiting for him to return to India and visit him in whichever city he sets up camp :P

It's actually been really, really long since I saw all these friends together in one place. Keeping in touch has been a little intermittent at times, very regular at others, but we have managed to keep each other updated on the important stuff. We have managed to be there for each other in our hour of need. We have managed to feel close, in spite of being far apart.