The Big Gang Theory

“God gave us our relatives; thank God we can choose our friends.”

                                                                                                      -Ethel Watts Mumford

Well, I must bestow my gratitude on Mr. Mumford here. For he has summed up an irony of a lifetime in one precise and crisp sentence.
The faintest of memories that have remained from my childhood are those where I remember being a Cuddle-bag for the entire set of relatives or those where I remember making my first friends. I remember my little hands digging into dirt to pull out small pebbles and building a spaceship with them (No wonder I wanted to be an astronaut, but alas! 'Growing up' got in the way)... I remember tugging at my Baba's shirt, going round and round in circles with puppy eyes focused stubbornly at his face, till he finally agreed to take me out to meet my first 'boy-friend'... Funny I put it in quotes, but truth is I didn't use to make a lot of girl-friends back then. I guess girls didn't like me because I was very bossy. Very very bossy.

Contrary to most girls my age, I liked baking in the sun in the Ranchi summer heat, wearing my decently long hair plastered to my scalp with oil and made into tight plaits and playing cricket! They comprise my fondest memories I must say.

They were my 'wolf-pack' you could say... and of course like every other girl I too had that one friend I could not do without. This friend of mine was a legacy passed on. We were 'her father and my father were good friends, so we are good friends' friends.

But as time would have it, my hair grew longer, the boys metamorphosed into little tykes and my cricket went for a very long, never to end 'time-out', and I finally started making friends with girls, though I can clearly say ,they weren't fond of me. And I missed out on the best emotion my childhood could have had, for I never really had a good, true friend.

Since then however, a lot of things have changed. Maybe that's because I had chosen to change as well.

By now, the importance of friends has somehow now reached a new, sacred height. The kind where you can re-schedule tickets to be there for her birthday, the kind where he stays up all night talking just because you are scared, the kind where they simply go on a mad spending spree along with you, just because you are depressed, the kind where even if you meet after no matter how many years, it always feels like yesterday when you used to make houses with building blocks, and just yesterday when you guys used to discuss about 'that' guy at class, and so many more things.

I may not be old enough to pass a judgment about my life that I have had, or rather have been having, but I sure have realized a few things. Not all friends will still grow up to be friends. Not all of them will miss you. Very few of them will stay in touch. And the foremost of all, you too will learn and want to let go off a few friendships here and there. There will be fights, letting downs, 'sorry's, and other things you wish that weren't there. But they will be.

However, out of every ten friends, there shall be at least one who will be 'your person', the one who will know what to say when, and when to shut up and let you mourn, the one who'll take care of you. So no matter how many friends you have, I am sure we have found that set of 'our people'.

And I consider myself very lucky, because I have managed to have my own 'big gang' and have formulated what I like to call my ‘Big Gang Theory’:

“Make friends. A lot of friends. Have friends who are normal, weird, funny, not-so-funny, chilled out, paranoid, geeky, dorky, 'jugaadu', 'fattu', hot, cool, amazing, impossible to understand, well more kinds if possible. Have a big big gang. And somewhere among this Big Gang of friends you'll find a set of people who will stand out. Who will be 'your people' someday and some point in your life... and no matter how unlikely it may seem to people around you, a few of them will be your friends no matter what."

This Big Gang theory is my survival theory. We sustain, support, insult, hold-up, stand up for, make fun of, and be there for each other. This Big Gang Theory is the story of my own little universe. And hell yeah, my universe is expanding!