Last month we had a reunion in kodai and got opportunity to meet my college mates after a long break… I’m surprised to see friends getting changed for different reasons… As we grow we loose the importance of our friends… Their priority in life gets changed… And their character and personality also changes…
We must understand one thing that this happens even to us, we change without our knowledge and this can be felt only by our friends… Five out of eight members of our gang made it, in fact it is only we five stay in touch and other three are almost out of touch… I was really amazed to see how my friends have changed… We were all people with common synergies during our college days… We all lived and cared for others wellbeing than thinking about ourselves…
I can openly see that I’ve lost touch with Balaji with whom I spent 90% of my time during college days… It would be less than 10% of the time we would have spent for each other during post college days… Balaji got married and he is a father of 4 month old and I’m surprised to see him becoming more responsible… He has already started talking about sacrifices he has to do for raising his son… Then it is Vicky, he has been my best mate in college with whom I share all my happy and lull moments, we see to it that we share some quality time for each other… But I can’t believe how Vicky has changed from his US visit, Vicky has become more practical guy unlike what I’ve seen him 3 years back… But still he a good hearted guy and I wish he remains the same for ever…
I can also see a lot of change in me… With people taking different paths, different priorities we no longer have same sort of synergies and we find different people filling the space, where we get linked with people whom have common interest and synergy… Every time we reach a destination we have to shake hands compliment each other and start back with our own journey and move ahead with the memories of our old journey… That is life and we have to move on with it…
AnandNataraj 
Hi Anand:
It almost same to everyone. Our priorities changes in every stage of our life.
‘People may come, people may go, but we will move on forever(with new set of people) to face challenges in our life’
In my childhood, I was deeply touched by a teleserial in DD called ‘Tholainthu ponavargal’ which is based on Sa.Kanthaswamy’s novel of the same title. It is a story of one of the friend(the hero) tries to bring together his schoolday/childhood friends and acquaintances from the past together and hopes to reconstruct the joy of his young days, only to discover that it is not possible.
Natural language. Characters who don’t sound self-conscious. A penetrating look into human psychology. A must read. I don’t know if you read tamil novels but I will recommend you to go for this book which shows what we are experiencing now.
After reading this book, whenever we have farewell ceremony(school, college, NIIT etc.,), I will be the odd man out pointing out things from this serial/book on practicality in life where in the party crowd where everyone will be sorrow/worried even cried that we are not going to be together.
I used to tell them, out of our current closest gang, maybe 80% – 90% will make for the first gettogether, then it will be 30%-40% in the second and will be 0-10% in the next and whole get together will be stopped. This is is practical as everyone of our freinds(including us) has to face different journeys in their life which is going to be filled with unknown surprises, successes, failures, new freinds, relations and we cannot expect they all come together on a given hour or two, leave alone a given day.
It may be sound odd or some might feel I exaggerate things, but to me this is practical and I always experienced this post our farewell days in schools, colleges etc., and hence I always keep my expectations low which helps in great deal in balancing my life. And whenever I happen to connect back to my freinds(by any means) I always appreciate their time and making sure I am not bothering too much as I know that they need to have their own space
Thanks Anand, your article really made me to think a lot as I just reconnected with my NIIT friends where some of them happy to see me back and some of them were angry that I disappear for long time and now coming back 🙂 And you know what, I feel equally happy against both types of these responses as it feels great that your freinds appreciate and also take try to take control/care over your by expressing their unhappiness towards us and warn us that I should keep constant touch with them.
Hope u won’t mind me taken a big comment space for this post 🙂 I just started as a small note but the topic made me to write it as big one, more than your post content 🙂 Maybe, you should make me as co blogger/author to your blog 🙂 Just kidding… don’t mind…
Regards,
Swami
http://ksawme.blogspot.com
Hi Swami,
Even i watched that serial, rajesh did heros role… It is a strange co-incidence, i was thinking about that serial after returning from koday… You are right slowly thinks are fading… This 8 years has changed everyone and dont know what will happen after 20-30 years from now :)…
It is nice to see that NIIT guys staying in touch till now… I dont even know what my NIIT mates are upto… But yes 3 days of kodai trip took me back to college days and really enjoyed a lot :)…
Infact you are really helping me by sharing your experiuence and you comments are motivation me to wire regularly…
Thank you
Anand
you have the serial video of tholainthu ponavargal serial