Gaurav keeps calling on his friend Abhishek’s mobile but Abhishek keeps disconnecting it, Sonali keeps pinging her cousin who always replies back with this sentence “Catch you Later”, and some reactions are I don’t want to talk about that, I don’t feel like meeting her anymore, let’s not discuss that, it was just a past, I am not in touch with Sunil who used to be my best friend at school.

I m sure many of you would have encountered a situation where u would have reacted as above. That’s how we react when we overlook our past relations (any kind of relationship) and intend to forget them. Yeah I know what we all agree with, life means get going and not sticking with one thing, life means experimenting and not just getting along with routine stuffs , life is so busy that there is no time to think for anything and if nothing works out, the best tool we use is to blame it on someone else. But the unfortunate part is we start feeling the same for our relations and also for the people whom we are related with without realizing that it’s nothing to do with our life or time rather it’s us who want to get rid of something/somebody.

Case study 1:-Ruchi was very happy to see her cousin sister cum friend, Priyanka after a long time. Ruchi had her weekend off and visited Priyanka who was in Pune.Priyanka didn’t seem to be very keen to meet Ruchi which was very evident on her face and by her unusual behaviour. While Ruchi had so many things to tell Priyanka, on the other hand Priyanka didn’t have time for them. She was busy in talking to her friends on phone and texting them and also with her roommate who was there at that point of time. Ruchi was embarrassed but priyanka didn’t bother about it at all. Ruchi was disheartened and she couldn’t figure out the reason for Priyanka’s unnatural behaviour.Priyanka didn’t seem to be upset or sad about anything .So was she just avoiding Ruchi or had she got so many friends now that she didn’t require her cousin sister anymore? Whatever it was, Ruchi was not expecting this and since then all her feelings, emotions and thoughts for Priyanka were altered. They are hardly in touch with each other.

Case study 2:- Rohan & Vikas had been very good friends since their childhood. Now they are working. Two years back they got admission in MBA. They were extremely happy for the fact that they were in the same college and will have a good time together. The first year went well for them. They studied together, supported each other when any problem arose, and both of them did well in the exams. Vikas was quite worried about his career and stuff like that. Rohan had been a great support for Vikas. Vikas wanted to achieve everything very fast and he started expanding his contacts. He made a lot of new friends and started interacting with people from different backgrounds in order to get a good career. But while he was doing all this, he forgot about Rohan who in spite of being equally worried, always helped and consoled Vikas. Rohan did make new friends but never overlooked Vikas. On the other hand Vikas wanted to get rid of Rohan as he believed presence of Vikas in his life wouldn’t let him make new friends and new contacts. So slowly and gradually they started getting disconnected from each other.

Do we ever make an attempt to understand “Is anything worth at the cost of splitting from our near and dear ones”, “Why someone, praising whom you were never tired of, is now turned into somebody whom you can’t stand at all”? No we don’t, why should we waste our time thinking about something which happened 2 -3 years back, Why should I take the effort, she should apologise. We would have hundreds and thousands of reasons for not doing so but just for one reason i.e to safeguard our relations, we should ponder why we actually forget old relations.

• Don’t feel the requirement: - May be you feel the person is not of any help to you so you don’t require him/her anymore.
• Too many things: May be you are preoccupied with so many things in your life like job, spouse, children, boss etc. that you don’t want to take the effort of still maintaining old relations.
• Expanded group: - If you have enhanced your friend circle and have added many people in your contact list, you would no longer remember /miss your old buddies.
• Change of priority:-As you grow, different things like education, career, money, house, new people, work, etc get added in your bucket list and accordingly your priorities change. So you stop speculating about people with whom you used to be appended to few years back.
• Taken for granted: - Have you started assuming that your dearest friend will do anything for you if you are in any troublesome situation? If yes, it means you have actually started taking your friend for granted which will jeopardise your friendship.
• Unpleasant experience: - You might have had some experience with a person which could have generated a friction in between you both. This can also become a reason for you to get disconnected with that person.
• Unsorted misunderstandings: - Many a times you believe what others say and you just leave the things like that without elucidating the misunderstandings that you have in your mind. Any unsorted misunderstanding may lead to break up of any relation.
• Ego: - The whole story of human beings and their relations will be incomplete without talking about their EGO. Your ego can be a big hurdle for any of your relations. You believe he should apologize to you, he should give you a phone call first, he should take the initiative for patch up & and many more such things your ego tells you to believe. That’s how ego takes you away even from your close ones.

Whatever the reasons could be, if you still have a longing to maintain and not forget a relation that you shared once with a person, you will be able to do so. Sounds difficult?? Let’s brainstorm and see whether the following facts are convincing enough for you to keep up with your old relations or not:-

• Do change your priorities but avoid omitting & deleting your old realtions from your bucket list. You can manage to give them a call, or ping them, write to them at least once/year. Believe it or not, your buddies, friends, won’t mind even if you keep them last in your Bucket list of priorities.

• If you are a kind of person who feels proud of having a fantastic PR based on the number of people in your friend list of Orkut, Facebook, etc, you will just be left with shallow & fragile relations. So if you are really yearning for deep and candid relations ignore the quantity but don’t ignore the quality by being in constant touch with your true and old friends.

• Learn to respect people and more importantly whatever they have done for you. It doesn’t matter if they helped you 5 years back or 5days back. Remember such people never lose their kindness, generosity & honesty and you never know people whom who you feel are not required anymore may be the one to hold you up when you don’t find anybody in your surroundings to back you up.

• Be forgetful about incidents and not your relations: - It doesn’t take seconds for you to decide that you will never meet a person who lied to you even for a small thing, or who didn’t treat you well. But it’s a herculean task for all of us to forget such incidents and by the time we forget them, the person on the other side has already forgotten us. Try not to hold any grudge against anybody, if it’s there talk it out. Forgetting the person will be costly affair than forgetting such incidents as it takes whole lot of your energy, commitment, trust, honesty and many more such things to begin & build a relation.

• Always try to have clear and open communications. It helps you to sort out any of your misunderstandings and thus facilitates your relations.

• Try to keep your ego aside and make a phone call to your old friend /relative whom you have not spoken to for ages just because of ego.

• Last but not the least, if you after reading all this, think that you will make the whole of it a big laughing stock, I am sorry friend, you are absolutely mistaken as I trust myself and my friends out there that you wouldn’t find anyone to join you in that fun of yours. So if you still feel honoured in telling people that you are a very pragmatic & practical person and you don’t belive in emotions, feelings, commitments etc, you are making things extremely difficult for you. It’s always wise for us to keep ourselves miles away from such person to save our relations.

So people what are you waiting for now, go and get your telephone dairy and start calling up people (who used to be very close to you) whom you have not heard from for ages, write to those from whom you disconnected yourself completely due to some sort of misunderstanding or because of your ego. We don’t what will be the reaction on the other end of the line but certainly you will find yourself to be happy, relaxed & at peace. All the best friends!!!