Two Degrees Of Separation

I remember when I was in school. I think it was around 9th or 10th. I always had trouble making friends, like actual close friends. I used to be that kid who was fully focused on studies, wanted to be the teacher’s favourite, and it was kind of hard to make friends because of that. The annoying kid in class who always tried to be over-smart. Yeah, that was me. Everything changed after I joined high school. I found a pretty great group of people whom I instantly bonded with. I still have contact with my friends from high school. I occasionally call them, even though most of them are spread out around the world. There are a few in town, although I don’t see them every day. Now that I think of it, I haven’t seen some of them in a few months. I should actually be checking up on them.

I thought I wouldn’t make that many friends in my life, but turns out I have a bunch. I met a few people while I was preparing for engineering. College is what surprised me. I have a few classmates that I am really close with, but I have a lot of seniors and juniors that I grew closer to than my classmates. I also have this really small gang of friends in Kochi, although some of them are in other parts of the world. These folks randomly spawned into my life, probably because of similar interests. Another handful of people that I’d die for! I am grateful for all of these people in my life. I also have a few friends that I met while travelling through India. Although when I say that, I don’t mean that I interact with them daily or even monthly. I talk to them once in a while, and when we chat it’s like, we just resume where we left off. There are people whom I wait to see so that I can tell them all the things that happened in the past year or few months, and we go on chatting with each other for hours and hours nonstop, filling each other in on what they missed and what’s happening.

I have lost a bunch of my friends because of death. And that got me thinking: if I vanish off the face of the earth one random day, would one of my friends who aren’t connected with each other even know who to tell? Like, would someone tell that dude in Bangalore, “Okay, this guy isn’t there anymore”? So I think I’ve introduced most of my friends to each other. Kind of like two degrees of separation. Most of them, even the disconnected circles, have a few people who know each other. So technically, not a disconnected circle. There are intersections of people in all of my friend circles. Even the one-off ones. Even if it’s just one friend, I think I’ve introduced them to at least someone so that, you know, if I’m not there at some point, they’ll know.

I was travelling to Bangalore the other day and I was thinking about this exact same thing. How would a friend in an isolated circle know if something bad happened to me? So I think that’s taken care of mostly now, although there are about two or three friends whom I still need to introduce to someone, which I’ll take care of.

I mean, I do say this to everyone when I meet them, but just writing it down here: thank you for taking the time to push me to come and meet you. You know, for someone who most of the time just wants to stay inside and read a book or maybe do something in front of the computer, it means a lot that you either call me or push me to come and hang out. I’ve had friends who came to check up on me because I wasn’t active online. They were like, “Dude, where the hell are you?” So it’s nice that you have people who care about you. Now, at this point in life where I think I took a lot of things for granted, especially in terms of friendship, I am lucky to have had the privilege of being cherished or loved by people who would have never been a part of my life, but they were, because of some random probabilities in the universe. Thank you.

Two degrees of separation. So I will probably have to introduce the rest of my remaining friends to at least someone so that there aren’t any disconnected circles. So yeah soon I guess!