True Friendship Is a Stubborn Thing
"A friendship that can end never really began." - Publilius Syrus
When Time Says "Screw Physics”
You know what's funny about friendship? The damn thing refuses to follow rules. I learned this in September when I landed in Chandigarh, India, planning a long weekend visit to my childhood friend after fifteen years. Those four days turned into four weeks, and his home became mine.
"You still look like shit Adi Bhai," he said at the airport.
I did. And just like that, fifteen years evaporated.
The Beautiful Irony of Growing Up
Life has a way of serving up perfect ironies. Here's my friend – once the wild card of our university gang – now living the most centered life imaginable.
Every other morning, he's on the golf course by 6 AM, maintaining a handicap that makes me question if he's secretly been a pro all along.
His life has the kind of routine and stability we used to mock mercilessly in our twenties. And damn if it isn't beautiful to witness.
Yaari: Where Indian Friendship Meets Modern Life
In India, we have this beautiful concept of "yaari" – a friendship so deep it becomes part of your identity. It's written into our cultural DNA, showing up in everything from Bollywood films to ancient texts. But it's one thing to romanticize it, another to live it decades later, oceans apart.
Tennessee Williams nailed it when he said, "Time doesn't take away from friendship, nor does separation."
But holy hell, nobody tells you just how true this is until you're reliving old rituals – black coffee in hand, trading stories until dawn, and falling back into the sacred tradition of 'geddi' – aimlessly driving around town like we're still twenty and time is still infinite.
The Sacred Art of Stupid Decisions
One night, over our fifth cup of black coffee, we howled with laughter remembering the friend who, drunk out of his mind, decided to climb over my friend's wide-open gate while his mom watched in bemused silence. Nobody stopped him – because that's what friendship looked like back then. Equal parts stupidity and loyalty, wrapped in uncontrollable laughter. These seemingly ridiculous moments? They're the threads that stitch our lives together across time and continents.
Modern Friendship Advice is Bulls*it
Modern wisdom preaches that friendship takes work – regular check-ins, scheduled calls, and constant validation. The self-help industrial complex has turned friendship into another fucking job, sandwiched between "drink more water" and "practice mindfulness." But true friendship creates its own physics, its own rules of gravity. It pulls you back into orbit no matter how far you drift.
Time Capsules: Memories That Keep Giving
One evening, we drove to Chandimandir, the Army HQ where we used to play squash and crash Saturday parties. The road hasn't changed, but we have. Instead of racing towards the next party, we found ourselves pause-laughing at memories, each story triggering three more. "Remember when..." became the chorus of our nights, each silly memory carrying the weight of gold.
Naval Ravikant puts it perfectly: "The closer you are to the truth, the more silent you become."
The same goes for friendship. The real ones don't need constant validation or scheduled Zoom calls. They just are – like the rhythm of your mother tongue (isn’t Punjabi like a rajai in the winters), forgotten until you start speaking it again.
When Distance Can Go F*ck Itself
Living across continents, we've built different lives. Our daily rituals had changed – his morning golf, my corporate grind. Our cultural contexts have shifted. But that's the beauty of true friendship – it doesn't just bridge these gaps, it makes them irrelevant. In a world obsessed with cultural differences, real friendship says "fuck that noise" and creates its own culture, its own language, its own time zone.
The thing about those university friendships? They were forged in the fire of bad decisions and worse judgment. We had friends who were essentially chaos catalysts, always pushing us toward the next terrible idea. And we followed willingly, creating stories that would either end in triumph or therapy – usually both. Now these stories are our sacred texts, each ridiculous moment a verse worth memorizing.
Stubborn Friendships
So here's my advice: Stop treating friendship like a Tamagotchi that needs constant attention to stay alive. The real ones will survive your busy periods, your life changes, your failures to reply, and your occasional asshole moments. They'll endure across oceans, through life changes, beyond time zones – not because you're maintaining them, but because they're maintaining you.
The next time you reconnect with an old friend and it feels like no time has passed? That's not luck or coincidence. That's what friendship is supposed to feel like when it's written in your bones. Everything else is just social maintenance.
True friendship is stubborn as hell. Thank God for that.
We're all doing our best ~ Assume Positive Intent!
Adi