Weekly Photo Challenge: Friendship

There are friends and then there are true friends. There are virtual friends but just a handful I meet in the real world. Some friends are helpful, some boastful, some just there to say hello to, so you feel alive. Some have thousands of friends, others a few hundred. Some are funny, some are gentle, some are losers and some are just so beautiful, you wonder why you were not a bit like them. Some are loners, some are social butterflies. Some friends you lose touch with, others touch your life in profound ways. Whatever they are, they’re friends and none of their flaws or strengths really matter when you meet them, laugh with them, celebrate life with them.

Friendships are delicate fragile things, they may last a season or if you’re lucky, a lifetime. Can friendship be defined as a fleeting moment of joy between two people, maybe three, maybe four? Maybe friendship is a party. Or is it an unbreakable tie that bonds us all in a special way forever? For me, friends are like that spoon of sugar you add to your favorite beverage. They’re those lines running parallel to your lifeline on your palm. No matter what the diversion, they come back to run by your side. Maybe some fade away at the end, some may run longer. To me a great friend is one who knows you, respects you, trusts you and above all doesn’t ditch you in your time of trouble. Those kind of friends are hard to find. I count myself lucky if I have one.

When I looked through my collection of images, I found several moments of friendship. Here are a few of some people I know and some I don’t. For me they capture the many facets of friendship. A moment in time that flickers by. I’m happy, I’m trigger happy.

The beach is one of those playgrounds the earth provides us to form eternal friendships.

Friends from childhood have a special space in our memories, no matter how old we get and how forgetful we get we’ll always remember those castles we built-in the sand together.

Sport and a passion to do similar things is probably the reason these two para sailing operators from a remote village in Orissa are so chummy. They love serving tourists in Goa.

The owner’s son may be a petulant globetrotter but when he meets the man who manages their shack in Goa, they’re like old buddies, exchanging jokes in Portuguese.

Talking, walking, discussing and losing an argument to let your buddy win is a sure sign that the friendship is going to last.

Joining in with a bunch of volleyballers to knock the ball around makes friends out of complete strangers as they scream, hum and haw in unison.

Sometimes a daughter is a mother’s best friend.

As the adage goes ” the dog is man’s best friend” in this case my girls’ best friend.

I hope to be my daughter’s best friend, but to be that I know I will have to stop being a pest first!

A glowing tribute to the beautiful faces of a friendship that was refreshed with Christmas lights.

It’s great to see young friends grow up together, no matter how apart, they’re always together.

These two Egyptian girls were so thrilled to see the camera that when I asked them not to pose they decided to express their bond of friendship in the most natural manner. These little girls were part of a brood of school children on a study excursion in Luxor.

Sometimes a friendship might depend on doing as being told. Especially if they’re screenplay writers bored with all the sightseeing in a historical hotspot where every statue is an immortal Sphinx or Pharaoh.

Physical appearances can most certainly make friends out of strangers.

As the old Simon and Garfunkel song goes: The sounds of the city sifting through trees,                                                          settles like dust on the shoulders of the old friends

The school and the bonds we share doing silly stuff together bring us back together as pictured here. My mother was reunited with her buddy in her neighborhood after a gap of almost 30 years! How heart warming is that.