‘You both might share the relationship of brother & sister but it doesn’t look like that,it seems more than that’

This statement of a fan caller on a reality show I saw today took me back to my school days. Where to walk with a boy and to call him brother or ‘just friend’ was so essential. And if you did what I did ‘he is my friend’ not like ‘just friends’ but a good friend then you are caught in trouble. A lot of teasing,pairing up,taunting etc.

But a snap back to reality, the boy I called my friend in school days I am unable to share the same bond now. His mother felt I tried to drool her son and she did public defamation of me and her own son for reason best known to her. Today we cannot talk just like that in public, I have to meet him secretly on our building terrace or chat on phone. It is not that we both fear his mother or the society but we do not want yet another drama of defamation that shall hurt our families. He is my friend and one of the few childhood friends I am still in contact.

There are a lot of layers to this. Firstly all should have the right to live the way they want. Make and maintain relations as they wish and not what the society expects and accepts. A friend or a brother is not always essential a tag. At times it should just be the way it is. A bother is a brother and a friend is a friend, both these relations should not be mixed. I agree for love to happen friendship is essential that does not mean every relation should be looked at in the same sense. One thing that pricks me more is that this thinking pattern is set in our heads as school kids and so stays with us forever. This is why the adults of reality show and the fan caller perceived the way they did.

I felt this is the reality of small towns of big cities. As I talked about this many of my contacts, social media friends also had boys who faced this. There are few who got over this and have pure friendship with their friends while many others miss a friend in life who got misunderstood of being something else. There are even friends who get Rakhi tied on their hand as they know only that one tiny piece of string can help them be in contact. Sounds stupid but this is the reality.

There are a lot of things that have to be molded for the development of the country but some things should get extinct right now. It is high time that thinking is changed and it can’t be done in a day.

I feel helpless about this situation. Only thing we can do is promise one self to make sure that our future generation does not face this unfair reality.