K – Kites Café

I had a classmate in college who was not part of our general group for various reasons. One he was against Malayalees (for reasons unknown) and considering ours was a full-Mallu group, well, it’s obvious why, isn’t it. Plus he made quick judgments about people in the class and he stuck to them the entire three years. He also had very strong beliefs in God, religion and related things and also was very vocal about them, while I don’t think this in itself is a wrong thing, he wasn’t very tolerant about other people’s beliefs.  

To tell you the truth, I never really liked him, primarily because he has that typical attitude towards girls that people in the region have and having grown up around it and tasted the freedom that educated women in Kerala have, I couldn’t go back to accepting the status quo of women in the region and he was representative of that. It didn’t really matter, either to him or to me, and in college you know how easy it is to stay in your comfort zone and chill without really paying attention to whose lives are falling apart and whose lives are getting made. By the end of the first year, he had managed to piss off pretty much everyone in the class. He stuck to his own couple of buddies.

I recall this person now because he has been involved in a lot of social work in the city, started his own group of businesses with his friends, made short films – all these updates I gather, thanks to Facebook. Of course, whatever be the personal relationships, we ALL are friends on Facebook.

He started a café in back in Coimbatore. One of its kind there. Very chic, very nice place. They have a fancy menu, nice food, great ambience, superb prices. I loved the place when I visited a couple of months back and my family did too. He pinged me on Facebook later asking for feedback and made efforts to implement some of the suggestions I had given him. Without any air-kissing or brouhaha.

All this progress and his straightforward behavior, which has been honest above all, make me think I might have gotten him wrong. Make me think I might have missed out on making friends with one of those people who are genuine, outspoken and driven towards a goal. And when I think of the wasteland that was my college life, the wastefulness that were the relationships I built in college and the other waste load of people I have been associated from that period of my life, I might have been better off being friends with someone who wasn’t all that popular but very genuine and honest about who he is.

How much we try to conform because of peer pressure. How much we lose out of because of that. I have lost a little bit of respect for myself because of this misjudgment. 

And it is because of these reasons that I deem myself a pathetic judge of character. 

 

P.S: The title of the post is what his café is called (:

An Ode To A Best Friend

There were once two little girls who drew on classroom walls and invented a ‘computer language’ that only they could understand.

One bit the other during a fight, made herself the butt of all ‘teeth’ and ‘dog’ related jokes for years to come and it was the start of something called friendship.

One had an irascibly know-it-all attitude and the other, an inevitably bad haircut.

They tried recruiting members for their ‘club’ and when everybody called them crazy, they moped.

They grew up ten minutes away from each other. They argued over who’d marry Rahul Dravid and bonded over Jassi Jaisi Koi Nahin’s Armaan, Rahul Dravid and WWE.

F.R.I.E.N.D.S fanatics, they became. ‘Dog’ biscuits, they ate. ‘Evan’, ‘Conner’, they crushed on. School was a blur of nonsense, long walks & talks and secret meetings at one’s place.

Same obsessions, same loves, same pains. But two entirely different people.

One knew what the other was thinking and they smirked at everything in perfect tandem.

They wrote letters to each other about the five hours they spent apart and laughed about it the next day.

Bhajans they attended, dances they performed, called each other five times a day (they dialed each other’s numbers on auto-pilot every time they picked up the phone).

They started blogs and blogged about utter nonsense. They went to lame farewells and still had fun.

One fell in love with an entirely wrong person and the other picked up the pieces. One had sense to limit the damage and the other was, predictably, an idiot.

Then they grew up.

The secret visits dwindled. The dreamer chose the dreamy life and the practical one, the proper one.

They made other friends, lived separate lives.

The bond dissipated. They no longer knew what the other was thinking.

They ran out of things to talk about.

Their beliefs changed. Their crushes did too.

WWE and SOC lay forgotten in the deep recesses of their hearts.

Today, they stand at different places, looking in different directions, wanting entirely different things from life.

One doesn't miss anything else from her old life except the girl who understood her better than her own mother.

And she is scared that the old bond is gone forever and a part of her childhood that she cherishes the most, is lost in the sands of time. The worst part is that she knows she has no one else to blame but herself.

Gayathri Chandrashekaran, whatever happens to us, you will always be my first best friend and you’ll always be special.

I love you. And I miss you.
Are we still on for the world tour?