Take a Step to make Relations closer: call the other one your Friend!

Take a Step to make Relations closer: call the other one your Friend! – 16 Jun 13

Post author:Balendu
Post published:16/06/2013
Post category:My Life
Post comments:0 Comments

After some more programs in different places around Europe I finally came back to Vrindavan at the end of the rainy season in 2005. It was in that time that one of my new friends from Germany had planned to come and visit me and my family. She surprised me while she was here, making me wonder about the closeness of relations in India opposed to the closeness of relations in Germany – there seemed to be huge differences!

I explain you the whole situation from the beginning. This woman had been my organizer in 2005 and I had come to her place twice in that tour. She had expressed the wish that she wanted to visit India and the Taj Mahal at least once in her life. It had been a long-time dream of her to travel to India but she had just never dared. Now that she had found someone who lived in India, she wanted to make that dream come true. I anyway invited everyone whom I met to come and visit and was happy that she wanted to accept this invitation.

When she told me on phone that she wanted to come, she explained that she didn’t want to travel on her own, which is why she was coming with another woman. It was fully fine for us, we picked them up at the airport and then brought them to the Ashram. We showed them the town and also the Taj Mahal in Agra. She had a great time and we enjoyed it, too.

At some point in conversation I said something like ‘Do you and your friend enjoy your time?’ or some similar, plain and normal question. The response that I got was surprisingly strong. The woman told me ‘Oh no, she is not my friend! She is just my travel companion!’

I looked at her in surprise and asked ‘She is not your friend?’ ‘No, I have only known her for two or three months before we came here!’ I was very surprised by this explanation! If you have known this woman for several months and then decided to travel to India with her, aren’t you friends?

This showed me that everybody’s relation to other people happens in a very individual way. I could actually call you a friend while you still think of me as an acquaintance! In India you start calling people as though they were your relatives quite quickly. Someone who was a stranger in one moment is called your aunty or brother in the next.

I wondered: is India more superficial and do people just pretend having a good relation? Was our guest actually right to say she didn’t know that woman so how would she call her a friend? After all she could not know her inner feelings well, she didn’t know too much about her past and she had not opened her deepest secrets to her either!

I decided however that I preferred staying more closely to each other. If you always wait years until you call someone a friend, you will really have very few friends. I call a lot of people my friends and even though they may all be on different levels of closeness, I think calling them friends brings them already closer to my heart. I believe seeing people quickly as a friend or relative brings more heart into your relation with them, it makes you feel better about the other one, ready to get to know the other one better and open to get to know more people.

That’s how I decided to say good-bye to my friend when she left and not only to an Ashram guest.