AS WE MOVE ON WITH LIFE, we meet several interesting people but only some of them become our friends. A few of them, filtered down, become family. Filtering is a natural process and only true friends pass this sieve. I am reminded of an incident involving a true friend who was ‘filtered out’ of my life.
This fellow met me in college – we became close and spent a lot of time together. I used to smoke an occasional cigarette but this did not go down well with my friend, who tried his best to stop me. I ignored him. With time, he became more zealous and at times even irritating on his anti-tobacco quest.
After a while, I started avoiding him. He did not take the hint and kept trying his best to influence all the girls in college to avoid me as I was a ‘smoker’.
I was in college, enjoying my freedom away from family! And who the hell was he to impose restrictions on me and force me to change my ways for some idealistic self-obsessed way of life! Still, we carried on somehow, forced together by habit and geography.
One fine day, he hit the proverbial final nail in the coffin.
My dad gets a call from him spilling the beans on my habit. Dad was upset. When I came home that day, I was interrogated and had to explain that in college it was a normal thing for people to smoke sometimes. That I was aware of the ill effects and had no plan to make it regular.
I also had to tell Dad that a person complaining about me should not be treated as a friend but as an enemy.
Somehow, Dad was convinced and I moved quickly to tackle my newfound nemesis.
The way I saw it then, I had a couple of options: thank the friend, or scream at him. But I did neither and just stopped talking to him altogether. Also, I stopped smoking in front of him. Time and Nature filtered him away. It made me wiser in choosing my friends.
I met him few years after that on a cold evening. Guess what, he had a cigarette in his hand and was smoking in style, just like in the movies! He offered me a cigarette. To his surprise, I told him: “It has been three years since I stopped because on an over enthusiastic friend….”