The Unique Charm of Friendships + Recommendations

Thoughts and a Sunday list.

Hello internet friend!

Tell me, are we friends? I appear in your inbox once every week, I send you a long written expression of my thoughts and opinions, you give me your time, maybe you even anticipate my emails, maybe you think about the things I talk about after having read them, maybe you are suddenly reminded of something I have said while scrolling Instagram, if you have been here for long then you might also have born witness to my entire lockdown experience. Doesn’t this sound like a friendship to you?

It’s funny in a way you know, how we define friendship. It’s too concrete, too structured. You can only have school-friends, college-friends, work-friends, or for that matter internet friends. As if friendship needs to be located, pinned down, reduced to their place of origin. Then there’s the unsaid hierarchy of friendships like Maslow’s pyramid of needs. The top tier obviously belongs to the school friends, the logic being they are your “most real” friends, friendships based on purity, innocence and they have seen your entire journey since childhood. Followed by college friends, they are your real friends too, but a little less real, friends who saw you blossom into adults and navigate life. In the third place, we have, work-friends, the people who have been given this dignified place on the pyramid because somehow they have managed to charm you unlike the colleagues, who are people you just work with. And then finally, you have internet friends, the unique creatures you met on the treacherous internet, people you most probably haven’t met and are probably evil people masquerading to be your friends! 

But I guess, like me, you know that nothing in life, especially relationships and people can be boxed in such neat defined categories. Your school friends might not know a thing about you, maybe your entire childhood you suppressed your real self to fit in and maybe it is the internet that empowered you to be who you want to be, and that “stranger” on the internet you have known for only 6 months makes you feel more comfortable than people you have known for years. Friendship is about the warm feeling, the comfort, the intimacy of thought, the knowledge that there’s a person you can fall back on.

In friendships, time and space become relative. An evening filled with coffee and chatter might be equivalent to 3 years spent in college together. 

I consider us friends. What is a greater sign of friendship if not this intimacy of thought and expression that we share? I know it’s one-sided, it’s mostly me who does the sharing. Let me draw a poor analogy, our friendship is like an echo, I am the person who actively makes the sound, and you are the mountain. The mountain doesn’t do anything to say, it’s just there, it’s presence in itself is an act of doing. The echo takes place only because the mountain is there. Similarly, you are reciprocating this friendship by being present. 

Thank You for being my mountain. 

“इस बेढंगी दुनिया के संगी 

हम ना होते यारा 

अपनी तो यारी अतरंगी है रे” 

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What I was reading this week?

1. We can maintain only so many friendships at a time.

2. The war of social media is not going to be over so easily,

   • Time for Twitter to stop behaving like an internet colonizer?

   • Does anyone care about our privacy?

3. China might have to pay a huge price for its one-child policy

   • Why is China allowing couples to have 3 children?

   • How China’s declining birth rate can become the world’s problem?

   • A timeline of population policies in China

4. More news from China, the World’s first case of human infection to H10N3 reported.

5. How can the CEO of Zerodha take home a salary of 100 crores?

6. This ScoopWhoop backed startup might disrupt the D2C economy.

7. Goa government has made pre-marital counseling mandatory to control divorce rates!

8. An anonymous artist is chronicling the government’s disastrous Covid-19 response.

9. The unseen Covid-19 risk for unvaccinated people. (Take a look at the brilliant infographics)

10. The New York Times is a hypocrite.

11. How to be great?

12. How to be happy?

What I was doing this week?

1. I spoke to the Economic Times about the growing pressure of algorithms on creators.

2. I spoke to Saloni Srivastava, Founder of HustlePost academy about the Solopreneur culture.

3. I hosted my first clubhouse session with Sayasha Pillai. I am a newbie at Clubhouse so please send me any interesting conversations you come across.

4. I met Nikesh Murali!! Such a fun conversation.

5. I started a mini-blog series on my Instagram captions.

   (P.S.- this is not me bragging about things I have done, this is me trying to share the conversations and experiences I have had so that you too can be a part of it if it interests you!)

Music, Memes, and every other good thing in life!

1. A song about our friendship

2. The perfect song to vibe with the morning breakfast! Or anytime you want to groove a little sitting at your desk…

3. This gem of a song from Taare Zameen Par

4. Close your eyes and let this song drown you! Every other song on this album is equally great!

5. Came across this really cool substack, especially cool if you are a Gen X.

6. Some innocent cheese violence!

   

   

   

   Thank you for reading till the end! I would love to know how we became friends, how did you come across me. Was it school, college, or the internet?

   Also as you can see, I am trying out a newer format that resonates closely with my older format. Or as Adam from Dark would say, the new is old! Forgive my lame analogies… but please let me know what you think about this format, do you like it? do you hate it? what else should I try out?

   It would make me really happy to receive a response from you. You can reply back to this email directly or comment down below and my DMs @pawan_rochwani are always open for you too!

   I will see you in the next one, till then take care!