The Few Who Stay

“My enemies are many. My equals are none.”§

I wanted to begin this article with a quote attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte.

Then I checked.

He never said it.

It was apparently written for a video game trailer.

And somehow, that feels fitting.

We often accept things because they sound right. We hear a sentence, believe it, and carry it with us without ever stopping to ask whether it is actually true.

Friendship is much the same.

We use the word constantly. We call people our friends because we sit with them, talk to them, laugh with them, go places with them, or simply because we've known them for years.

But what actually makes someone a friend?

And how many people can we genuinely call one?

When I came to India after staying in the States for 7 years, I felt the vast cultural shift. The shift from everyone being your friend and everyone helping you, to everyone hating you for being different. Having a different accent. A different mindset.

That shift was gigantic. It took me many years to work my way up the school food chain.

When I came, I was a bug. Everyone seemed determined to squash me. I was being mistreated and verbally abused. I soon realized that the rules of social survival here were different. You have to reciprocate harder. They verbally abuse you, you respond in kind. You have to show them that you are not some punching bag, but instead a sparring partner.

This is when I realized that, in this world, most people do not give a shit about you. They care about winning, no matter what gets in their way. They fight dirty. They throw other people under the bus even when there is a way for both people to walk away unscathed.

I saw friendships being broken, relationships that lasted less than my phone's battery.

I began to wonder if friendship was even real.

Maybe it was just convenience.

Maybe it was proximity.

Maybe we called people friends because we were afraid to call them strangers.

That's when I realized what a friend meant.

A friend is someone you can lean on when your legs don't work. Someone you can rant your heart out to and receive no criticism, or perhaps a stream of profanities. 😂

A friend is someone who won't judge you at all, or will give you a 10-minute, profanity-filled lecture on how you're better than this and you don't have time in your life for these distractions.

A friend doesn't necessarily agree with you. They don't have to. In fact, sometimes the best friends are the ones who disagree with you the most.

And that's when I realized something else.

When I came to India, I was surrounded by what I thought were friends. Their intentions became clear later, and eventually I realized that some of them were never really friends at all.

So what is a fake friend?

A fake friend is someone who will always agree with you. Someone who will tell you what you want to hear. Someone who will try to talk you out of every fight, not because they care about you, but because they don't want to stand beside you when things get difficult.

A real friend might tell you that you're being an idiot. They might disagree with you. They might even tell you not to pick a fight.

But when the moment comes, they don't disappear.

“If we go down, we go down together.”

Then proceeds to brutally clobber 15 dudes twice their size.

That's friendship.

Not blind agreement.

Loyalty.

This is the rarest commodity in friendships and relationships nowadays: loyalty.

People are not loyal. People cheat. They are deceitful.

And perhaps the numbers explain some of it. A recent analysis of U.S. General Social Survey data found that only 13% of Gen Z respondents believe that most people can be trusted, while 74% believe that “you can’t be too careful” when dealing with others.

Trust, it seems, is becoming a scarce commodity.

A true friend is one that you can trust with all your heart. If you tell them that you robbed a bank, they would rather be brutally tortured than tell the feds about the criminal.

Now we go a step above best friends.

A brother (or sister).

More specifically, a brother from another mother.

What does this mean?

In essence, this means that even though the two of you are not related by blood, you share a bond deeper than that of blood.

You can go over to his house, act like it's your own home, and you may even have a spare key to that house!

To sum up what a brother is, if you give your brother a falafel, he will indeed rob a bank with you. 😂

After my experiences with my so-called friends in school and after "The Incident," I stopped trusting people, until I met my current ride-or-dies.

My brothers from different mothers.

My badminton buddies, the ones I can talk to about anything. Husky, Dev, Rami, and Manas.

And how can I forget?

My brother.

The first person that I could proudly call my best friend for life.

Vivaan.

And before I finish, I have to thank someone.

Husky.

You were the one who told me that I should write today. I didn't have a topic. I wasn't planning on writing anything.

You gave me the push to sit down and write.

And somehow, that small suggestion became this.

So, Husky, thank you.

I guess I owe you one article. 😂

Life is like a book.

You are constantly writing new chapters. Characters come and go, signifying that not all friendships are meant to be. Some are side characters. Some stay throughout the book. Some disappear for a chapter and return later.

But you never know.

As a friend who has left the book told me:

You can't predict the future.

And maybe that's the beauty of it.

I don't know who will be there in the next chapter. I don't know which friendships will last, which will fade, or which unexpected person will walk into my life.

But I know who is here now.

And for now, that's enough.

My enemies are many. My equals are none.

My friends are few.

And I wouldn't trade them for the world.

—Vihaan Vaghela