What to name it

The one show that I watch with all eagerness would be "Tamizh Paechu engal moochu" on Vijay. For the very simple reason that, I totally and completely adore the concept. Today's topic was pretty interesting. A topic that is taboo even in present day society - Relationship without any name between men and women. It was quite an interesting topic and challenging one for the speakers and they spoke quite eloquently without majorly dabbling on the point for want of time. The society we live in has names for all relations. Father, son, brother, uncle, grandfather, lover, boyfriend, husband and even if there is a loss in the relation there are names for them as well- widower, divorcee, orphan(!!) And equivalent ones for women as well. In between this maze of names blooms in a friendship or two.

Man - woman relationship which falls under the last category are often looked upon with suspect. A friend of mine once told me, there can be only 3  kinds of relation possible between a guy and a gal. Either they can be siblings or husband and wives or lovers. Friendship is just a stop gap stage in this relationship triad, where it either transforms into platonic form of a brother sister one or as lovers. To say I was quite taken aback by this was an understatement. If there is something that I can feel really really proud of in my otherwise inconsequential life, its my friends and specially the girls. They share a very special space in my life and some of them, I believe, are friends for life. I take as much liberty with them as I do with my boys. I am sure it would be the same from their end too. All this coming from a person who had tough time even to look at girls in school, leave alone talking with them (sic).

Some of my closest friends are girls and I consider myself lucky that they think of me on similar scale too. I feel really humbled when they call me up to share their joy,sorrow,issues and victories and rejoice and remorse for me as well. To me a friend is a friend, be it a guy or gal. But not many in my own circle share this view. One look at my friend's list, the first comment that I get is "Machaan...ivlo ponnunga frienda unakku!!". I used to be like "err..so what??" But nowadays I don't strain even that much into thinking :) There is another group of excuse seekers who promptly declare all these friendships are possible only till marriage and post which poorikattai on respective households will take over. Most of my close friends are married and not just them, post marriage even their spouses have become friends. So rather than losing on their relation, I've happily gained more. Some of us have so much in common that, people often mistake us to be siblings.

I personally believe, any relation is based on frequency of the people and not on their gender. I don't want to compare it with any incident or issue to empathize the reason, for its too pure and genuine. At times its better not try to classify everything. There are certain things that are beyond explanation. Rather than wagging tongue let the hearts lead the conversation.