A friend’s tale

I have this friend, who is quite weird, different and altogether irritating (most of the time). I know this sounds odd because I started off with a negative note, but please bear with me and go ahead. He is my old-school friend whom I barely remember until our reunion day. I spoke well to him as if I have known him since ages, though my memory still failed to recollect any relevant traces of memories of us.

Days passed by, we had a set of mutual friends with similar mind sets to work for the well-being of the society, together we made decision to start an NGO. Out of the whole batch he had different plans. That plan we made and the mottos we had were fair enough. But, we being in different states of our country our availability was a major set-back. What happened later, is all together a different story.“World is so small” I had a different set of friends who are nowhere related to my school, but he ended up being an acquaintance in that circle too. This is the start of our journey. Let’s get started.

I always thought I had lots of patience, but he proved me wrong. Say, we are having a discussion on “Free Softwares” and mean while some other friend shows up and starts telling about the latest “Game of Thrones” episode and you lost the track of time. After a while amidst any work you doing he starts of with the same line where we stopped about the Free Software. The first time this happened, I was like where is this all coming in GoT???? He reminded me of what we talked and then finished off his lengthy speech. I know this seems to be a very good thing but it's kind of not cool ( sometimes :P ). Then, I understood why he was doing this. He is a person who wants clarity to the micro, nano, pico minutest level of details and can’t live peacefully without that. One thing I shouldn’t miss appreciating is his patience and storytelling skills.

Honestly, my initial thoughts of him were nearly of a womanizer, smoker and an alcoholic. These words are quite too intense to term him for what he was. As he does all that occasionally. Days are passing by and he called me telling he wants to talk. That day when we met he told he is planning to quit alcohol. It was an ultimate element of surprise. I asked “why?”. (The answer he gave me was an wohooo moment). I want to quit because when people look up to me they shouldn’t take this as inspiration. I should be a person whom people look up to. As far as I know he stuck to his decision since then.

Meanwhile, I got to know about the social experiment he started that to understand the humanity levels of today’s people. Where he was seeing if he would get lift to commute. He travelled for a month by asking lift where ever he went. It’s the second element of surprise.

He learnt so much about people in that 1 month span of time. I realized one thing from all of these that I being a women doing some similar experiments would have a very different end results. Anyway, I shall ask him to make a blog post and share for all those who are interested.

But he never fails to amaze me. He bought a Bicycle for about INR 20,000/- I asked "Why did you take such a costly Bicycle instead you could have got a scotty". His answer was an eye opener for me! He simply told “I DON’T want to use any vehicle which would burn fossil fuels, I did not want to buy anything but, bought bi-cycle just to reduce the time consumed to commute for shorter distances which I am currently commuting by foot”. Now, he is almost travelling 15km to & fro to his office on daily basis. His primary commute includes on-foot & bi-cycle to any place within a radius of 20 km. This practice seems to be tiresome and hectic but it’s a choice of lifestyle.

I have seen people who speak pages about big things they want to do to improve the life conditions of the people, environment etc. But, very few put them in practice, he may have implemented a very small change in his lifestyle but it’s a very significant one. Never know how many more would be inspired by him. Any change you wish you want to see wouldn’t just happen unless and until you start making that change. He was concerned about the environment he took his decision today. Looking forward for his varied variety of inspirational adoptions to his lifestyle in the coming days.  

He inspired me to lead a life of my choices without thinking about what others would think.

P.S: He has been encouraging me to write and share. Here I am writing about him.

-Signing off

A proud friend of “Him”.

(Not mentioning his name to respect his privacy)