BTW, why do we wish everyone a //happy// birthday? I mean, is it just because it doesn’t make sense to wish someone a sad birthday, or are //we// really happy that its that person’s birthday or do we simply with that the person should be happy that its his/her birthday?

I set them up for the Old Town trolley today, which kept them busy for the whole day. Tomorrow they’re going to Sea World. And then they have to leave Saturday morning anyways. In between all this, I realized that there is so much still to see and do in San Diego.

Anyways, coming back to friends. I won’t waste time trying to define friendship. Its like defining love, perhaps worse. Its like trying to tighten ur fist around grains of sand and they just slip out, or like Heisenberg’s uncertainly principle :D See, there I’m almost trying to define it now :) I could never grasp the concept of a best friend. Not when I was a kid, and certainly not know.

My take is that when we’re young and as all children are, imaginative and more creative… at that age, the notion of a “best friend” is simply symbolic. Symbolic in terms of denoting your “experience” in the society if you will. If a 3rd grader doesn’t have a best friends, he’d probably feel “inferior” or even “outcast”. However, people stick to this notion even as they grow old.

I can understand having a lot of good friends. But I can never understanding having one best friend. Needless to add, having “many” best friends is just syntactically incorrect, so I won’t even go there. But think about it. Here’s this person you call your best friend. What does that mean? Is this person your most trust worthy confidant? Sharing, caring and looking after you? Or doing all that by your definition a friendship entails, and doing it better than anyone else? What do YOU feel towards him? Do you feel this relation should be symmetric? What does it mean to have a best friend who doesnt consider you as a best friend? Do you trust your best friend? What is so “best” about him/her?

To me, the concept just doesn’t make sense. I can proudly say that I’m fortunate enough to have known a lot of wonderful people in my life so far, and I’m really glad in my heart for the friends I have. Like I said before, I have a lot of really great friends, but I would never dare label a “best” friend, because implicitly it implies a comparison among friends. And that, is a concept that I absolutely loathe.

My model of friendship is based on what I like to call the circle of trust. My relationships all fall in different circles of trust. In the innermost circle, the center, its just me. I don’t trust any one more than or even as much as I trust myself. But that is the nature of the thinking being, I guess. I mean, if you believe the “I think, therefore I am” philosophy. In any case, for whatever reasons, I don’t think there will ever be anyone inside that innermost circle of trust. There are some things, which I wouldn’t like to share with anyone, ever. And AFAIK, almost everyone has such secrets — they might be silly, but they do exist.

Then comes the next circle — for me, this would consist of your family, your spouse and maybe some very very close friends. From this point onwards, the circles are very very subjective. As you go farther out from the center, the trust level decreases. The outermost circle is for just connections and acquaintences. Now you might ask, am I not contradicting myself by “comparing” friends when I put them into different circles of trust?

But look at it this way, I can put a person in a circle of trust independently of where everyone else is placed. So its not really a “comparison” in the strict sense. It is a kind of evaluation, if you will, but we all do that naturally, so I think its okay. However, in labeling a “best friend” you have to do an implicit comparison of one friend against another, because an independent evaluation doesn’t make sense.

As Abhaga says, sometimes we should just stop and think and be grateful for the wonderful people in our lives. Cheers to all friends, and friendship! :)

Anyways, we remedied the situation quickly. Suchit was immediately lifted and served with high quality intense GPL (**not** the GNU GPL please). Himanshu was at his best as always, and Anish avenged me and Manish when he took out his slippers and … The rest of the night was mostly peaceful. A cop did come once, but that was about it. I tried Bacardi Silver that night and absolutely loved it.

Then yesterday it was Mac’s birthday (well technically yday it was Suchit’s bday and Mac’s is today, but I’m talking in terms of the night they were beaten up :D ) Mac, being as clever as he is, had already setup a well thought out plan of action to escape from his doom. He laid out some medical history saying he had slip disc and we couldn’t risk injuring him because it could even lead to paralysis. After some deliberation, the panduz conceded that we could indeed not take that chance; however, we also agreed that a birthday without a bash would hardly be complete.

Necessity drives innovation and we did innovate; we held him up, only face down and then we used feet, hands and slippers to impound several “surgical” strikes on Macs butt! There was a whole lot of gulla, cake, beer, rum and vodka thereafter. Yesterday I tried Smirnoff Ice. Almost like Bacardi Silver; and I loved it as well. Ragesh was a bit pissed of at us for a scandalous mail sent to Panduz earlier yesterday, so he wasn’t as involved as he normally is. But I guess he’ll get over it in a few days time. His birthday is coming up next. I can’t wait to thrash the living daylights out of him. Muaahahahahaha :D

The next morning we all lazied around in getting up. The main agenda of the day was to go Kayaking. Since it was the first time for all of us, we were all quite excited. We had made reservations with Aqua Adventures at Mission Bay. After a hasty breakfast, we left at around noon and actually reached quite before time. Since we had about half an hour in hand, we thought we might as well drive around Mission Beach. So we did that, and we would have taken a walk on the beach if only we had been able to find a parking spot. It was soooooooo crowded, so we just went around in circles a bunch of times before heading back to Aqua Adventures.

The kayaking tour itself was a lot of fun. I was a bit scared initially since the kayak wobbles a lot if you shift your body weight even slightly; but after a while you get used to it and infact, after it was over I thought that the kayak is actually quite stable given the amount of turbulence it can handle. Initially we also faced some problems steering the boats. Basically you can either steer it around manually or use a rudder (with controls at the legs); the rudder was definitely very convinient and quite a saving grace especially for PSD :D

We rowed almost non-stop for 2 hours — our guide Mike took us across the bay, under two bridges over to the SeaWorld backstage from where we could get a sneak peek at some shows; we headed up as far as the penguin enclosure, but it wasn’t as great as it sounds. The journey back was much more easier than the onward journey, probably because of the wind and the receding tide. It was a great workout, but it took its toll on everyone; it came down really hard on Ragesh, who had to resort to hot water massage to relieve his pain and swelling in the arms.

After kayaking we were all tired and hungry; an Indian lunch was unanimously decided and we headed to the Indian complex at Miramar. The lunch was pretty good (except for the slight mishap with Ragesh’s order!). Having filled ourselves up, we headed out to the beach. Though it was evening by then (almost 6), we were still able to catch a bit of the sun. Ragesh dropped down dead after walking for a few minutes; Asim and PSD walked into the ocean and Asim took a swim while I tinkered around with my camera.

From the beach we went to Point Loma to view the sunset. The view there is amazing; everytime I go there I’m fascinated by the majestic Pacific’s immensity and tranquility. It was getting a bit chilly and we were all still in our shorts, so we left right after the sun set and headed straight for home. We ordered Pizza for dinner; Asim dozed off early. PSD, RJ and I started watching Hera Pheri but I too dozed off in the middle, so we pushed off Hera Pheri for some other time and went to bed. The next day was Camping Day, and all of us were even more excited for that. But I’m tired now, so I’ll put that in another post.

Ragesh and I had been thinking about calling over some of our Greek friends for an indian dinner at our place for quite a while now. Actually Kostas, Yannis and Periklis have already invited us twice, and we had promised them that a dinner would soon be held at our place. That was like a quarter back, and so it was kind of embarassing. Part of the delay was the fact that our house never seemed to be in a hospitable shape. Another reason was that I was not very sure if all my room mates would be okay with such a dinner.

After the quarter got ever, we really didn’t have an excuse coz we had ample time to clean up the house and sort things out. So finally Ragesh gave out the invitations for Tuesday night. I had a paper deadline coming up, and Manish and Mac were both busy with some of their stuff, so despite the summers it looked as if the dinner was a mistake and would end up in a miserable disaster.

We had chalked out an ambitious menu — poori, chhole, dal makhani, kheer, raita, pulao — the works. However, till tuesday evening it wasn’t even clear who was going to do the groceries, who was getting the drinks and who was cooking what! And most importantly, the house wasn’t ready either. I came back at around 6 pm on Tuesday, the invitation was for 9. After that it was just a race against time!

But it was fun! Ragesh cleaned up the kitchen while I arranged the living room and cleaned out a whole lot of trash. Then I made chhole and dal makhani, while Ragesh cooked Pulao. I made the dough for the poori, Ragesh rolled them and I fried them. We took off kheer because of lack of time, but we still managed to get the Raita in place.

In the end, it didn’t turn out to be bad at all. Infact, the guys loved the food and I was really glad to see that we almost ran out of food that day! :D We had some wine and apple juice for drinks. But the really interesting part was that we ended up watching “monsoon wedding” with the greeks! Dubey ji totally impressed those guys too!! More on the greeks some other time

I guess the spirit behind the notion is that there are people around you who feel you are special and important and that this day is to celebrate that feeling, and to enjoy in the company of loved ones. But to me it often seems that this meaning has been long lost. These days, the “happy” birthdays are just associated with birthday parties where you go with a present, eat drink and then come back. How often to do we **actually** feel happy for a person on his birthday? How often do we really find our selves thankful to have enjoyed the company of a person, and thus want to celebrate this occasion?

Atleast to me, it seems that this is happening less and less. Nevertheless, I had a great birthday. Its actually on 21st June (which, I like to tell everyone but most people don’t appreciate, is the summer solstice too… or was it equinox?? well something!), but since 20th was a sunday and a treat from Himanshu for his internship in Qualcomm was also due, we decided to celebrate on 20th evening itself.

The day didn’t start off very well, since I was slogging on this paper but not making much progress. Then finally sometime in the afternoon I made a breakthrough which lifted my spirits and put me in the mood for a party. Initially we were thinking of going to an Indian or Thai restaurant, but since we didn’t have a car, we really didn’t have many options. We ended up picking California Pizza Kitchen; a) coz we’d never been there, and b) coz i’d always wanted to go in there :-D We made it to CPK at around 9:30 or so. Nishant was generous enough to sponsor the drinks. We started off with a bottle of red wine. I still haven’t been able to develop a taste for wines