What is the price on your "friendship" tag?

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Every year the first Sunday of august is celebrated as friendship's day. This day brings me some really baffling memories of fights that need not really have happened but I was at the same time gladdened by the fact that they did. I am not a believer in keeping just one day to celebrate friendship, love etc… Why should we have specific days for telling someone you care for them or love them? These “special days” include mother’s day, father’s day and all the other days. The reason for designating a particular day is to make the consumer fish take the bait. Consumer fish is so blinded by materialism that feelings are given no consideration whatsoever. The key ingredient of these “special days” is the extravagant gifts that are exchanged. As pathetic as this is and as a common occurrence around the globe it sometimes makes me wonder if being shallow is the only way to get by in this world. If it is so, I think I’ll have to start off with pretence of being extremely caring about people who mean little to me, put up with dung brains and also allow myself to stoop low enough to make myself acceptable in a clique.

Going back to the memories that I mentioned – in school in 10^th standard the year that was considered final for classmates because most would be going to junior colleges instead of continuing with school i.e standard 11 and 12 the celebration of these days were looked forward to with much anticipation. Let me admit to being slightly slow in comprehending the need to look forward to celebrating something with a bunch of people who may or may not have been my friends. Friendship day arrived and I reached class and a whole set of girls tied their friendship bands on my wrist and everyone was wishing everyone a “Happy friendship's day”. We took our seats as the teacher entered the class. Classes went on for the next 2 and a half hours and lunch break bell rang. All the girls crowded around me with their hands outstretched. I knew I was in for trouble. I looked at them questioningly, then I understood. Then I told them that I am not a believer in such customs and practices which are only a way to sell products that nobody in their right mind would buy. That the whole thing is a gimmick into fooling people to buy useless knick knacks which have far less value than what it is priced at and that it is actually a very nice example to understand the concept of demand and supply. I would have said more but before that I had a whole bunch of girls yelling at me telling me that I don’t understand the concept of unity and that I don’t understand class spirit. Ok so this is why I like being on my own. I never understood why I should be bullied into accepting things because a larger percentage of the group accepts it. I wasn’t trying to be :

1. Different from them

2. Nither did I want to spoil their fun,

3. If friendship was really what they wanted I could do so but without the fancy frills attached to the concept.

4. Why is it so important to tie the proverbial band to proclaim your friendship?

5. And most importantly why on a particular day?

But after having learnt my lesson, to avoid conflict I was armed with bands the year after that. As I have mentioned in several posts 11 and 12 standards were the best ever. People behaved like normal teenagers we chose random days to do random things and most importantly we had fun like nobody else on this planet. This was the time I was reunited with most of my kindergarten friends. I branched out after KG and the school that I joined was the only school till a couple of years back that had 11 and 12^th standards. All my friends from tinytothood were back to being my classmates. As strange as it was we all had clicked on a certain wavelength which is hard to happen in a heterogeneous crowd but the fact that it did was amazing. No I won’t talk about college :) Though there was one incident which had to do with this day which resulted in me being branded Ms No feelings. [I was actually proud of this name.]

Cheers.