What quality do you value most in a friend?
Dilip was a good guy, maybe a bit too innocent for the world he was living in and he still continues to live the same. His life turned out really well with a good and most importantly ‘clever’ wife and a beautiful daughter.
We are glad things turned out this way for him, because the way we used to see it, he was definitely on his way for the worst kind of hurt.
One deficiency of this world is its lack of understanding how goodness truly lives within these people who are often branded an outcast for everything non-flashy about their presence. I did not understand too. Oh yes, I have been with my share of the bad group, maybe not in the depth that you just imagined, but let’s compare it to a brush of paint.
I knew Dilip in school and by ‘knew’ I do mean just ‘knew’ because I never bothered to be his friend back then. A guy always smiling, happy and trying to be everyone’s friend even when no one wants to be his? Definitely sounds like a person who has a scam in mind, but not here.
Initially how does it start, even in high school? ‘You like the same anime? The same sport? the same game? Welcome to the list of my friends’. Yup that easy. Then as we grow and become weary + tired of some things and ignorant of others, we realise all the ways and extent in which we were wrong and, in that period, we look back at the Dilip we knew and we think, he was a pretty cool guy and perhaps we were the less cool ones.
Written by Anuran Chatterji
Early Morning Memories 