Friends forever!!

This post was originally written as part of a campaign for the website - housing.com to promote the power of optimism. In my earlier two posts as a part of this campaign, I have blogged about how for every choice we make in life, we #StartANewLife and how involvement of people through social media is giving a positive direction for the country and is helping us #lookup. In this post I am going to write about friendship and how it feels to stay #together.

All of us have that inner circle, be it of friends, parents, cousins or other trusted family members and no matter what happens, we always try to stay in touch with them. With the career choices we make, it becomes increasingly difficult for us to stay in touch. We are separated by geographies and time zones and yet connected through technology.

My inner circle took shape when I was in hostel. As our warden in hostel used to say, this is our second home and we are one big family away from home. Hostel gave me a bunch of really good friends. 4years of staying away from home wouldn't have been possible without these friends. Combined studies, mass bunks, movies, birthday bumps etc stay in our memories for ever. Then we graduated and each one chose our own path. 

Let me fast forward to 4years after graduation. I have 6 of my friends doing their graduation or working in US, 1 friend in Mumbai and 3 friends here in Bangalore. And yes, that is my inner circle. It is tough meeting the friends in Bangalore for more than once a month, so imagine getting together with rest of the folks. Thanks to technology we are always in touch through whatsapp and do a google hangout when most of us are free (timezone barrier makes it tough as some of us cannot convert IST to PST or EST or account for the stupid day light savings). So you can only imagine about how it would be for all of us to meetup in person.

The time had finally come for the biggest get-together after graduation. And we had to make it large. So we decided to meetup in Mumbai - the city of dreams. Out of our group of 11 people, 8 of them were there. We visited places, sat by the beach, had street food, discussed our college crushes - and their honeymoon/baby pictures. Relived the 4yrs of engineering in 3days. Also being in late 25s we had to discuss about our future - career paths, investments and worst of all, marriage. Each of us had learned a lot in our life, each of us had various perspectives and each of us were still open enough to share and decide what we wanted to do with our lives. This was one of the most memorable trips of all time for me. It felt awesome and we were together again :)

To conclude, when life gives you lemons, you would want to cut it into pieces and use it to raise tequila shots with the special people in your life.

Photo credits: Jami Pavan