Are we better people because of our friends?

From the last time I blogged to now, life has kind of altered completely for me. While I plan a separate blog post on changes that I am going through in life,, let me focus on Freindships this post this being the friendship month and August 6th being the friendship day.

Life has become quite hectic these days and am struggling to hit the work life balance. I have no time for myself and for my friends. I realized later that I did not call a single soul to wish Friendship day.

6th of August, though it was a Saturday, was a working day for me as I was hosting a conference that was going on at an organizational level at the place I work. Technology was utilized to the max with 10 locations in India and abroad connected via Video conference and I was the SPOC ( single point of contact) from chennai. The day was filled with frantic calls to Hyd, which is the base location hosting the show, whenever technology fails, which was pretty often.

While I remembered it was friendship day and I wanted to call a lot of my close friends, I could not and managed to send a nice message to all my women friends – If there are any of my men friends reading this, which is quite unlikely, my apologies to you. The one that I sent to my women friends was a very touchy forwarded message and I chose a select few friends from my address book. I had a broad smile on my face as most of the lovely ladies either messaged back or called me to say they love me too. They toasted for the friendship that I shared with them and they with me and it was quite emotional.

I remember writing about my best friend Pets earlier in a blog post and her birthday falls on august 6th. Pets has recently relocated to Chennai from Dubai for a short time ( 2 years) and is shuttling between Dubai and Chennai. Its unbelievable that I haven’t found the time to meet her in 4 months and sometimes I don’t even have the time to call her. She complains to me about it, and recently when she moved into her own place close to her parents place, I was one of the invitees for the house warming, and I could not make it for various reasons. I know with Pets I can explain and she would understand and I also know even without an explanation she would understand.

I so very much wanted to pick up a gift for her and meet her on her birthday, but the conference didn’t give me much scope for all that. I thought of her and called her more than a couple of times, her phone was either not reachable or she didn’t lift the handset. She must have been in the church when I called – at those times when she did not take my call.

To cut the long story short, I could not reach her the whole day except for the message that I sent for which there was an immediate response. And I also messaged her saying I am in a conference the whole day.

That night when I dozed off to sleep, Pets face was the last one I remembered..

My busy schedules are continuing both at work and at home and have no time for social networking sites etc., and this is what I found when I went to my facebook account last night, much after the friendship day and her birthday.  I did speak to Pets the next day though..

• PP posted toVincy Joseph

Happy friendship day to my best friend who is always busy but I know she thinks of me too............

I am amazed and touched by her confidence in me and my friendship and there is something else that touched me even more. She wore a salwar suit that I had picked up for her a couple of years back, for her cake cutting with her family and had posted those pictures on FB.

And later we had conversations and she said everyone asked me about the suit and I said this is Vincy’s gift.

I am so humbled by her love and friendship and am sure most of us have friends who make us better people just because of their friendships.

Do you have similar stories of unconditional love and friendship?