On Friendship

"Let there be no purpose in friendship save the deepening of the spirit."
-- Kahil Gibran.
Some time back I wrote about my views on Friendship and how it's been moulded like cheese over the years. In the post which can be found here , I mentioned the friendships I've had over the years and how nothing irks me more than investing your time, energy and efforts into someone you think you share a common bond with, only to be betrayed later on. It's almost like a silent death of the soul within.

So it comes as no big surprise that I don't subscribe to this whole notion of 'Best Friend'.

Having said that, I've recently had the divine pleasure of making the acquaintance of some amazing people who have such great energies about them, you can't help but ask yourself why it is that you never met them sooner.

I thought about this for a while and soon realised that we are all surrounded by amazing people, but because we're so focussed on those few negative people in our lives, we quite simply cannot see the roses through the fog.
Sometime's we hold on to people in our lives who drain our positivity like hungry leeches either because we hope that they will change for the better, or because we just don't know how to walk away. Neither of these options do us any good. It's like that growth underneath your armpit. You know that it's in your best interest to remove it, but you either hope that it will go away or simply ignore it in the hope that it will not bother you.

My Top 5 Tips to recognise when you're in a toxic friendship
* Does it feel more like a competition than a friendship, where you find yourself constantly competing to see who's better?
* Do you sense some falseness when you're congratulated on an achievement?
* Do you overlook the little things which really annoy you about them?
* Do they speak of loyalty while act in deceit?
* Lastly, when you're away from them for long enough, do you feel a sense of calmness & relief?

I'm starting the month of September with so many great opportunities ahead of me, and surrounded by some amazing people. One of my dearest friends said to me the other day ,"Kaloo, I'm ready to quit my job. It just feels like it's draining me." My response was to wish her a job that she has the passion and drive to enjoy each morning.

Life's too short to spend it doing the mundane, and just going through the motions.

Go out there and be great. It's within each one of us.

On Friendship

"Friendship is always a sweet responsibility, never an opportunity." Kahlil Gibran

We got to discussing friendship over tea the other night, and it occurred to me that I have many, maybe too many. Some dearer to me than others. Some have fallen by the wayside over the years, and many have grown closer and more cherished with time. Through it all though, I'd still like to think that if I ever bumped into any of the people I refer to as my "friends", I could pick up conversation with them as though we had never been apart.

There are very few things which annoy me to the point of my having to write about it,but having my friendship used for selfish purposes and personal gain certainly ranks way up there on the list.

Tonight's rant is about a guy I honestly once thought highly of and respected. He met me late last year and mentioned that he was looking for a place to rent, and as fate would have it a dear friend of mine just so happened to have the perfect home for him and his family. Before you could say "I'll take it!" the ink on the lease agreement was dry and he was moving in.
A perfect example of how goodness begets goodness, and positive karma attracts positive karma.
Or so I thought.

Within a month the cracks in his character began appearing, and now we're in a situation where he has defaulted on his rental obligation to the point of receiving an eviction notice.

All relevant and irrelevant excuses aside, here's my problem with this situation:
If you know that your character is wishy-washy (I looked this up in my Thesaurus and this is the best I could come up with) and you suspect that you have more flaws than the Eiffel Tower (pun intended), why in heavens name would you bring that to the table amongst friends?
If your'e going to be an asshole about your dealings, be they business or personal, surely you can have the foresight to be said asshole in the company of strangers who you don't have to face every other day at the local Spar or Post-Office. I mean even as a teenager I knew better than to date girls from my own suburb! I knew I was going to be an ass and dump them or be dumped at some point, and since I never wanted to bump into either them, their bigger bulkier dumber brothers or their licensed-to-carry-a-firearm dad's, I knew better than to date girls within the neighbourhood.
Surely that's common sense.

Be a dickhead, but just not around me. Or anyone I care about.
Now you've come to the adults pool in your Snoopy boxers, jumped in, frolicked with us, then rudely pee'd in the pool and left. Dude, you've just screwed the fun up for everyone.
Retard!

That's why I think once every so often, we should do an inventory of all the people we call friends, put all the names in a bucket, throw in some HTH, and purge all the crap that floats to the top.

Here endeth the rant.

In other news, I am seriously considering buying an iPad2.
Not because I need it, but because Steve Jobs and the good people at Apple say it will vastly improve the quality of my life. Apparently all that I am and all that I have been doing over the last 30 odd years is in fact truly worthless, because I have been doing it without an iPad2.
Turns out the Sony Playstation people who used the same marketing tactic were just setting us up for the iPad people.

I don't want my life to be worthless.

The Year That Was : 2010

What an awesome year it's been!

I contemplated giving you a play-by-play of all the greatest moments of this year, but it would simply be an entire days worth of writing, and possibly half a days reading (since I type half as slow as most of you read.)

The highlights and lowlights in no particular order :

2010 FIFA World Cup
No true-blooded South African would mention the greatest moments of this year, let alone their lives, without mentioning our hosting of footballs greatest spectacle.
From the opening ceremony down to the final whistle, our nation put on an amazing show second to none. We stood proud as we welcomed the world to our shores and held our heads up with dignity and pride as we let the event prove our naysayers wrong. When the final whistle blew, we rose as a united South Africa and showed the world that we may have our challengers for competing with the best in the world on the field, but there is none that could challenge us for national pride off it.
Well done to all my fellow South Africans. We did ourselves proud!

The Bucket List
For those that know me and those that visit my blog regularly, you will know that my passion is Golf.
I preach it, play it, eat and breath it. Now if only I could do it justice when I'm out there on the fairways and greens...
I've always wondered what it would be like to be a Pro golfer, or at least play against one. Earlier this year, I was one of 6 lucky individuals chosen nationwide to compete against the Pro's during a Vodacom sponsored event as part of the Sunshine Tour. The tournament was called So You Think You Can Beat Me? and I played against local Pro Jean Hugo, who taught me more in one day of golf than I could ever have learned in an entire month of lessons!

Next on my Bucket List was an Ocean Cruise. I've been wanting to do one for as long as I can remember.
I finally booked the missus and I on the Portugeuse Islands cruise, and it certainly lived up to it's reputation of being an excellent holiday!
You can read more about it here and here.

One of the most glaring items on my Bucket List and one which has been a monkey on my back ever since I started Sikama Contracting four years ago has been the business debt I took on to start the venture. It was like waking up every morning and having to fight a Tyrannosaurus Rex before I even had my first cup of tea.
So you can only imagine my glee when I finally paid off the last cent and my company became debt free!
I immediately went out and bought a Porsche.
No of course I didn't.
I'm Indian.
I figured for the price of a Porsche I could get 14 Tata Indicas!

Friends & Family
It's been a good year for members of my family with a few of them moving onward and upward into their new homes.It's also been good in this regard with some of my friends having done the same. Particular mention to dear friends of mine from Cape Town, who moved back to the Mother City after having been in Jozi for a few years. Badeeah and Abdullah along with their daughter Milla bought a Morrocan-styled villa overlooking the ocean a few months back, which now means we have a second-home in the Cape! YAY!!!

It was also a year in which I closed the book on a friendship which spanned almost six years. It's never easy to walk away from those kind of bonds. It's almost like uprooting a tree and hoping it will survive its new environment. Over the year's I've become adapt at recognizing fractured or cancerous aspects which sometimes creep in to a friendship, and I'm admittedly pretty selfish that way in that I would sooner walk away before things get worse, than stick around and try to fix it. I guess the "Life's too short" philosophy comes to mind here.
I've said it in previous posts and somebody actually called me about it and asked how in heaven's name I could simply walk away from friendships like that.
It's not a skill or a survival technique. It's just me being me. It's me looking out for myself. It's me putting a value on who I am, what I'm all about and how much I value my time and energy. I walk away when I feel I'm no longer respected as a person, or if the time and energy needed to repair the cracks are simply not worth it.
I've got friends who know and understand this about me, and have been around for many many years, comfortable in the knowledge that the bonds we share are like two comets in the sky: Never needing each other constantly to blaze our own trails in the night, but when we do meet again it's explosive and magical and memorable.

*If you're reading this post and thinking it's about you, I dedicate the following song to you...

Then there are the Internet, Blog, Facebook and Twitter friendships I have made this year, which have all been great and interesting in their own way.

To each of you I wish you an extraordinary 2011, and may the best of this year be the worst of the year ahead.

Be safe over the festive season, and let's make 2011 a year to remember for all the right reasons.

The Story Of Irma & Tiffany

There's these two awesomely cool and amazingly funny tweeple I follow on Twitter, and this is the story of how they met.

Irma (@irma_murray) and Tiffany (@jislaaikit) had been out partying in and amongst the same circle of friends without having known each other at the time.
Now I may get some or all of the facts wrong here, and I may even make some up as I go along, but Wikipedia calls this Poetic Licence and I sprinkle it about like rice at a Chinese wedding :) So bare with me here folks.

Anyways, sometime during this night of epic debauchery and random awesomeness, Tiffany ended up at Irma's place and was intending to get a ride home. It was just the two of them, as the song goes.
As I understand it, before they left Irma's place, Tiffany needed to use the loo.
Twenty minutes later and with no sign of Tiffany, Irma was starting to think that the chloroform air-freshener she had sprayed in the loo earlier may not have been such a great idea after all.
Tip-toeing toward the Porcelain Palace, imagine her surprise when she opened the door to find it empty and devoid of Tiffanyness!
A quick once-over of the ingredients of the Hunters Dry she held in her hand confirmed that the alcohol content was too small to induce delusion or epileptic drunkenness. She turned and headed toward the bedroom, more out of curiosity than from a belief that she would find the lost party therein. She already had Missing Persons on speed-dial, John Edwards from Crossing Over on the landline, and The Psychic Network on Google, so she knew she had all her bases covered for any eventualities.

She reached the bedroom and with timid hands, silently and slowly began turning the knob. With the door now open just wide enough to fit an un-permed head through the crack, she peeped into the bedroom and was greeted by the sleeping form of Tiffany, cuddling a pillow in the foetal position and looking like a splash of   rainbow that had broken away from a rainy sky and spread itself across her white linen sheets.
She stood there breathless and in awe. Never before had her bed looked so inviting.
She did what any rational and normal person would do given the circumstances.
She hopped into bed and snuggled up next to Tiffany :)

Today, Irma and Tiffany are happily engaged and have no idea when they were formally introduced.
(Hey, I did say I use Poetic Licence like rice at a Chinese wedding, didn't I? ;)

Ok, so you're probably wondering what the car in the pic has to do with this story, right?
Well, I have no idea.

But something tell's me that it will feature in Part Two of this Trilogy: The Running Of The @KerriBowie , followed by the final chapter, The Silence Of The @chef-lamb

Watch this space!

The Morning After

I've been contemplating writing about something which has bothered me for a few weeks now, but I kept putting it off unsure if I really wanted it out in the public domain.

Ultimately I suppose the blog can be cathartic and a good a place as any to unclutter one's mind.
Some people, and I know one in particular, even have a mystery blog wherein they write to their hearts content, comfortable and satisfied in the knowledge that nobody reading it could ever associate it with anybody in particular. Strange, but true. In a way, it's almost like calling those psychic hotlines. You never know who you're confiding in, and they never know who's on the other end.
Such a perfect symbiosis.
For some.

Anyways, I've skirted this issue which has perturbed me in a previous blog I wrote, about friendship.
As with all friendships, if they're not cemented with loyalty, trust and honour, they're almost worthless.
I thought I had that kind of friendship. I really did.The cemented kind.
Then the loyalty, the trust and the honour were tested. Unfortunately the friend I thought I had, came up short and failed. So I made a decision and decided to close that chapter and be thankful for all the great time's we shared and the bond we had.
I guess my ability to walk away from people and situations is so instinctive that it sometimes takes over before I even realise that it's happened.

So it was that we haven't spoken for about two months already.
I guess when you've had a friend who was as close to you as any brother ever could be, and you get let down by him, you really only have two choices going forward.
Either you forgive and forget and move on.
Or you contemplate the true value of the friendship and walk away.
In business, as in life, I always walk away if the trust has been broken.
Yes yes, I can hear you saying "But surely you can rebuild the trust."
I suppose you can. Life was never meant to be easy, but where I can I choose the simpler option.

Last night I went out for supper with the missus and some friends, and as fate would have it I saw him walking toward us. I always wondered what would happen when the day arrived, as I always knew it would.
I think there was a part of me that hoped it would be civil.
That we would be able to stop and say hello.
That we would be able to chat as two friends who know each other, since we no longer could as two brothers who were inseparable.
It turns out I was wrong.

It's a sad way to end a friendship, and i'm still not sure how I feel about it.
There's no arrogance or pride or self-righteousness lurking about, just the misty fog of the remnants of what was.
It's the morning after and the new dawn brings the hope of new friendships, and the ever-present possibility of  being disappointed again.
The only constant is change.

The Language Of Friendship

The language of Friendship is not words but meanings
                                                                HENRY DAVID THOREAU
I had an interesting discussion with the missus earlier today on the topic of friendship.
She has few and regards them highly. The relationship she has with her closest friends is almost as tightly-knit as the those she has with her sisters.
I, on the other hand, have many friends; but I do occasionally allow one into my inner sanctum.

It took me some time to figure out why I didn't subscribe to the idea of a "best friend", but the epiphany when it finally struck me was akin to walking through a dense rain-forest and suddenly finding a sunlit clearing; a moment of enlightenment almost.

From as far back as I can remember, about as far back as my earliest school days, my folks would move house or town more often than most kids would regard as being normal.
If they didn't move house, or move towns, they would move me from my school and i'd have to learn to make new friends all over again. This went on almost every year until I graduated from school. The reality was that I had never been in the same school for longer than 2 years at most.
The downside is pretty obvious. Never in one place long enough to develop a childhood bond with friends; never given the opportunity to develop meaningful relationships with my peers; always feeling unsettled and in a constant state of "New Kid Syndrome."
The upsides were not evident at first. It was really only during my analysis of my schooling and upbringing that I realised certain things, both positive and negative.
The constant change of schooling environment allowed me to interact with a larger range of personalities over a shorter period of time; it forced me to make friends sooner than most kids, as they usually knew each other from having been together the year before; and so it was that I found myself able and capable of entering a room full of strangers and leaving shortly thereafter with a pocketful of new friends.
I find it amazingly easy to make new friends. Conversation comes easily to me, it really does.

The human psyche being what it is, it also made me realise the futility of getting too close or forming too strong a bond with any of these new-found friends, since I never expected to be around them the following year.
This meant I had to learn to detach myself from people on a regular basis, and learn to be totally comfortable with the consequences.
I never had a best friend growing up. Sure I had friends I got close to, but never one close enough that the potential for detachment strayed too far away from the recesses of my mind.

Over the years I would find myself testing this resolve, and free-wheeling as I experienced levels of friendship I had never felt before. Issues of trust, loyalty and honour would constantly come into question, and I would learn to deal with them at an age when most guys had formed unbreakable  bonds with their inner circle already.
The very first time I called someone my best-friend felt weird to me.
But I laughed about it when he moved abroad a few months later.
The next time I referred to someone as my best-friend, I ended up moving towns shortly thereafter.
Third time lucky I hoped, and my latest best-friend passed away in a car accident!
True-story.

By this point I had lost all faith in the "best-friend" ideology.

This is the reason I continue to make friends very easily, but i'm extremely wary once in a friendship. I'm always looking out for signs of disloyalty, deceit or distrust.
As soon as I spot it, I head for the hills and never look back.

The missus can never understand why I can so easily walk away from a friendship i've invested months or even years in.
The truth is, i've been programmed to do exactly that as a defense mechanism from being disappointed by a friend.

Sure it's a cold hard way of looking at life.
But sometimes we are the sum of our parts, and our parts are never the same as those of others.
We don't always see the same things in the same way.

My favourite author says it best ...


On Friendship
 Kahlil Gibran
Your friend is your needs answered.
He is your field which you sow with love and reap with thanksgiving.
And he is your board and your fireside.
For you come to him with your hunger, and you seek him for peace.


When your friend speaks his mind you fear not the "nay" in your own mind, nor do you withhold the "ay."
And when he is silent your heart ceases not to listen to his heart;
For without words, in friendship, all thoughts, all desires, all expectations are born and shared, with joy that is unacclaimed.
When you part from your friend, you grieve not;
For that which you love most in him may be clearer in his absence, as the mountain to the climber is clearer from the plain.
And let there be no purpose in friendship save the deepening of the spirit.
For love that seeks aught but the disclosure of its own mystery is not love but a net cast forth: and only the unprofitable is caught.


And let your best be for your friend.
If he must know the ebb of your tide, let him know its flood also.
For what is your friend that you should seek him with hours to kill?
Seek him always with hours to live.
For it is his to fill your need, but not your emptiness.
And in the sweetness of friendship let there be laughter, and sharing of pleasures.
For in the dew of little things the heart finds its morning and is refreshed.