on friendship

a 30 minute drive from Noida to Lajpat

This Saturday I went for a concert in Noida. It was an eclectic group that congregated in Lajpat Nagar – two of my best friends, her boyfriend, her office friend and her boyfriends’ best friends. Even though the concert was pretty average (due to unnecessary edm remixes, lack of infrastructure that focussed on acoustics and Talwinder barely giving a flying fish to the audience), I had a wonderful night.

I believe in colliding your different worlds of friend groups. Like a collector, I have picked up one loved friend from every phase of my life. There are my colony friends, my bus friend, tenth grade friends, school best friend a Miranda friend , Jindal friends and the list goes on. It is an occasion when a loved one from a particular point in life meets another important person from another point.

One of the core elements of friendship is mutual caring. For whatever reasons a friendship might be borne, all philosophers agree that there is some kind of caring, of a varying quantum, involved in any friendship. Julia Annas believes that we care about our friends because we believe them to have certain inherent virtues that we aspire to have, making them intrinsically valuable.¹ Therefore, that caring gets extended to whatever or whoever your ‘worthy’ friend deeply values. When they introduce you to their closed ones, you put in extra efforts to get to know their closed one due to two reasons. Firstly, the inherent trust your beloved has in this other person is enough for you to skip the initial formalities that exist with a stranger. But more importantly, you get to know a wholly different perspective of your close friend through the eyes of someone they love.

Naturally, I gravitated even towards my best friend’s boyfriend’s close friends. For ease of convenience, let us call them X and his two best friends, Y and Z. Long link, I know, but there was no awkwardness or safety concerns that my mind could flag, only because they were automatically vetted and removed due to the fact that my best friend also trusted those men.

The concert got over, it was all dilly-dally and we divided ourselves to go back in two cars. It was late at night, my best friend was snoring peacefully and X and Y were driving in the front. It sounds so trivial, but I think I witnessed another deep friendship in play. The two of them were belting out Russ’s songs, driving at 120 km/hr on the highway and passing satirical comments to each other. They were in their own bubble, only enjoying each other’s company and every other person had faded into oblivion. According to Bennett Helm, shared experience is a touchstone of friendship and these joint pursuits, as a part of the intimacy that is characteristic of friendship, involve doing anything together.² The scene felt nothing short of a movie. It was two guys singing, immersed in their love for a shared interest (Russ) that was born only as a result of their friendship. I felt like an outsider, peeping into something that should not be available for prying eyes. But it was beautiful and I felt so happy at the moment, being young and carefree and existing in a world where friendship exists.

The other group in the second car also forged some bonds. They connected over distant relatives turning out to be neighbours in Rishikesh, never-ending work problems that transcends professions (the three of them were an engineer, a lawyer and a chartered accountant), and the fact that it was a really underwhelming concert.

Helm talks about a ‘plural agent’ in friendship - a group of people who have joint care and a joint evaluative perspective that is intertwined in a pattern of interpersonally connected emotions, desires, judgments, and (shared) actions.³ I love that I have been meeting a lot of new people these days, and most of them are close friends of my close friends. It is easy for friendships to emerge in these cases, especially in cases where the requisite of intimacy is already slightly built due to mutual caring.

The night ended with hugs but no promises to meet again. If fate dictates, all of our paths shall cross again. But for now, I was content to have been a part of such a special moment between two friends. Until then, I shall live my life voraciously in the hope of seeing such fleeting moments of warmth again.

1. Annas, Julia, 1977, “Plato and Aristotle on Friendship and Altruism”, Mind, 86: 532–54.

2. Helm, Bennett, 2023, "Friendship", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,<https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2023/entries/friendship/>.

3. Helm, Bennett., 2008, “Plural Agents,” Noûs, 42: 17–49.