The Ships that sank...

It's Friendships Day today and I've received several calls, SMS, scraps, and wishes so far. Although I don't like commercial stunts like friendship day yet I enjoyed communicating to so many of them.
By the end of the day, I was thinking of the friends who went missing in the endless layers of time, and then I noticed I couldn't even identify the voice of two of my very old friends, and still have some unidentified well-wishers in my cell phone's inbox. Distances have increased - not only in terms of geography but also in terms of chemistry.
Sometimes I feel like having all my friends around, having fun together, living those good old days with the same warmth we once shared - the plans, the dreams, the giggles and screams, the laughs, the sighs, the lows and highs.....

And then I recall the times when I tried to catch-up with old friends - finding out friends of junior-high during my grads; when I'm in Ph.D., meeting friends of graduation days; and yesterday, meeting with batchmates of IIMA.... The only thing common, every time I tried revitalizing those old friendships, was we ran out of things to talk about after asking and telling each other about old friends, classmates, and teachers - we had nothing to talk about. I felt completely alienated with them and their world. They have moved on and so did I. When it happened for the first time, I was taken aback by the sheer shock of it but since then I have matured a lot more. It doesn't hurt me to lose friends now. In fact, I have stopped fishing out friends of bygone times, for their memories grow fonder till our paths do not cross. I try to accept all this as a part of life and reiterate:

कुछ दोस्तों से वैसे मरासिम नहीं रहे
कुछ दुश्मनों से वैसी अदावत नहीं रही