We should never give up on our friends.

No matter how angry they are with us. It is very easy to give up in any relationship, what is hard is to clinging to it, sticking to it, keeping faith in it, holding it together even when all the things in the relationship are going wrong and falling apart. Friendship is like a plant, for it to grow into a tree, you have to take care of it, have to nurture it for it to survive the hard troubled days. Just like in any other relationship, in friendship too, hard days should be as treasured as good days, for it allows the friendship to mature, to grow into something durable and profound.

In this world nobody is perfect and nobody is living a perfect life. At some level we all are insecure, whether it’s about our education, our past, our job, our financial situation, our incompetence in this highly competitive world or whatever it is, but the truth is that at some level we all are insecure and this insecurity is increasing and reaching to ubiquitous level due to deep outreach of social media into our lives.

At some level we all are desolated and lonely, fighting our own little battle within ourselves every day, seeking compassion, seeking someone who’d understand us, who’d love us instead of our frailties, weaknesses and vulnerabilities and that’s where a friend pitch in, who’d listen with an open heart, who wrings out all the misery and melancholy that has occupied our heart and absorbs it all to make us feel lightened and less burdened again.

People get angry when they expect certain things from us and sometimes, somehow those expectations don’t get fulfilled. In the first place we should be happy that someone is at least expecting something from us because we expect only from our loved or trusted ones. We expect from our parents, we expect from our siblings, we expect from our friends.

Believe me Friends expecting something from us and then getting angry over it with us isn’t a bad thing at all, what could be bad is, our giving up on them. One friend getting angry and other cajoling him is one of the beautiful aspects of the friendship. Friendship is not supposed to be earnest and sober all the time. Friendship is supposed to be fragile and whimsical. It is different from any other relationship in our life. Like love, true friendship is a roller coaster of emotions.

You might have heard of the phrase “Like dissolve like”. If you are a person of reason and you rate yourself high, then it’s a surety that your friend too is a person of reason and it might be possible that he might have a solid reason to be angry with you. You should try to contemplate that reason. For the time being it may seem to you that your friend has got angry over a frivolous thing and though it might irk you but it is also possible that things might have been aggravating for quite some time and due to some other commitments in your life you couldn’t watch that.

It’s possible that your friend might have been going through a suffering for quite some time; he might have been looking for a compassionate friend, an open heart, a trustful and patient listener, a shoulder to lean upon. Though it’s not your fault that you were not there, you might have some other important and urgent matters at hand at that moment. But your friend was expecting you to be there for him, he waited for you to provide him a shoulder to lean upon, he waited for you to listen to his troubles, he craved for your counsel, he waited for quite some time and when he didn’t find you, he bore that suffering alone. He fought that battle alone. He endured those hard days alone. He has every reason to be angry with you and you have every reason to pacify him. You should coax him, make him comfortable, and at the same time make him sure of the fact that it will never happen again, that you’ll be always there for him. Make him believe that he means a lot to you. For my dear friend, life is very hard and it may be possible that sooner or later you’ll find yourself in the very situation which your friend is facing right now and in that moment you’ll need a patient ear, a warm hug, a comforting shoulder, a counseling brain, you’ll need a friend, a true friend.

So when friends get angry, no matter how angry they are, no matter how frivolous or grave the matter may seem, we should never give up on them. Never, for life is nothing but a barren island without the greenery of the friendship.

The Urge of Broadcasting in personal Communication

First of all, this post is not about demonization of social media ( and if somehow I manage to do that, it would be due to the strained relationship I have with the medium).

Some days back I opened Facebook to see that one of my friends had posted on his wall that 'he won't be able to come to my marriage' due to some reason best known to him. I didn't cared much about whether he comes to my marriage or not but what rattled me was the fact that he had my phone number, he could have called, texted or wattsapped me. But no, he chose 'posting on his wall' as the best option. Why didn't he printed out a hoarding and put it on his house wall is out of my wit.

In an another incident, someone close to me shared my photo on Facebook without asking me. Well, who cares for others privacy.

In one more and  an unprecedented incident, one of my friend wished me birthday on Twitter. Though, he had wished me earlier on the phone, but despite that it really amazed me that he chose a series of tweets to let me know how important I'm to him. Though I appreciate the fact that he seized the opportunity to let me know how important I'm to him, what startled me was the choice of medium because he has sent me these personally curated messages in the past as well but somehow this time the feeling was lost in the breaks between those messages of 140 characters.

These incidents made me think why's this urge to broadcast. I mean, when we have someone's number and have this option to communicate with them individually, why we choose the social media instead?

What goes in our mind when we decide to communicate through social media rather than communicating individually?

It's like going to someone's birthday party or wedding and instead of wishing or greeting them personally,  we choose to wish them on loudspeaker, and it can be okay if once in a while someone choose to do so(to make the occasion special) but what if every body start to greet only through loudspeaker?

Now, what could be the reason behind all this. I'm no social scientist(and don't have any motive to look like an  intellectual either), so I won't indulge myself into social pondering, and having said that I personally think there are many factors behind this behavior. 

First being is 'we care'. We greet on social media to make the day special for other person and to show the 'world' that we care for that person. It's our way of telling the 'world' that we care for that person. It's the most honest factor I can think of.

Now, the second factor is 'Me'. While the first factor was more about 'us', this is all about 'Me'. There are many people out there who greets people on social media not because they care for them, but just for the sake of it. They wish every other person. They don't feel anything. For them, Greeting someone is just like any other activity on social media akin to sharing or liking a photo or video. It's leisure activity for them, void of any emotions. They have your phone number, they could have called you, messaged you but for them, You're nothing more than a social media entity.

Third factor is 'expressing our self'. We choose to broadcast because we want to express ourselves. We seek attention, admiration and validation from random people on the internet and in that pursue we post messages on social media for other person without caring about whether they'll even get it and even if they get it, will they be able to get the feeling you wanted to convey. Whatever the message we are trying to convey, I think that a message that we definitely convey is that 'we care for our self more' than the other person. 

I think there is a soul and essence attached with every message and when we broadcast the message, that essence gets distributed and i feel that somehow it fails to evoke the emotion which it would have evoked had it been sent individually. On the other hand when we decide to broadcast a message instead of sending it individually, we trade off the intimacy of the message  for want of attention on the social media. By broadcasting, we unconsciously acknowledge that there isn't any confidentiality and intimacy in our relationships.

This constant urge of Broadcasting the personal messages is decreasing the intensity of the personal communication and deliquescing the relationships and to save the intimacy and intensity of  relationships, we must revert to the one to one communication.