International Friend

International Friend

Something came over me. I knew that this was not a good idea, but seemingly I had no other brilliant ideas. I opened Facebook, did a significant amount of random stalking, found a beautiful looking fair young lady from the UK, and texted her. This behavior is a repetition of the act I did three years before. I was fairly unsuccessful at that time. With the current pandemic scenario, I thought there might be some chance that this time I would succeed. 

After three days, I succumbed to the fact that "History repeats itself" and just got busy with other works. I even realized that, even if she saw my message request, why would she respond? I had messaged "Academics or Sports?". I reversed the roles and understood what she would have thought about my message. The next two days went perfectly normal, and something abnormal occurred on the fifth day after I had messaged her. I got her reply!

By now, I kind of had a firm belief on a self-created thought - "there would be a lot of people whom you would love, there would be a lot of people who would love you, but those two sets remain disjoint for the most part of the life".

So instead of getting sort of funny and flirty, I behaved in the normal way, as if I was meeting a new friend. And in fact, to be clear,

 I just wanted an international friend.

 There were two replies from her side. I kind of formed what they would be: "Seriously?" and "This kind of ice-breaker?". But the replies were kind of friendly. Maybe my thoughts were because of the peer group, I have?!

"Hi!"

"Academics & sports"

My brain cells got excited, and without a second thought I messaged her:

"Both, huh? Quite exciting, what in academics?"

After pressing the send button, I realized that what the heck was that message? I had messaged her as if I was talking to some girl in an international meet for selected candidates, and we are busy taking interviews of as many fellas as possible to obtain a ranking. Well, that is exactly what my peer environment has taught me - When you meet someone from academia, ask how much has the person achieved, and see where you stand. That is a harsh truth, but every single damn time it comes down to - "How much have they achieved and how much I have?". 

But she had a nice reply to that too. She sent me two links, two links of arXiv. For a moment, I thought of something as her area of interest, and just casually opened the first link. I was spellbound - she is the lead author. I felt that someone just said to me, here is your ice-cream which you want, but remember, you would later definitely catch a cold if you eat this here outside. Well may not be the best of analogies, but you should understand what I felt. We maintain our peer group to be in level with us, and suddenly if you meet someone, way out of your league, then that is out of the interaction syllabus you had with your peers. 

I had literally no response. She messaged me then, "you still there, right?".

"Yeah! I kind of froze."

"What's the temperature?"

"Around thirty or so"

"Then how come can you freeze?"

"You are like the dream girl, I had ever imagined of gaining the courage to talk to, and I kind of can't believe that I am still talking!" 

"Oh, I'm flattered. There is this genius friend of mine, he has already published four papers!"

Now, what does my peer group had taught me? If a new girl starts talking about a boy whom she knows, then stop talking with her, you are ruining your own time, you don't stand a chance. Well, why the hell can't you just make friends? Why does it always comes to the fact that you have a chance or not with a girl, huh? Wonderfully, they have no answer to this!

We kind of got into talking and got to know a bit more about each other, started laughing at the funny incidents that we had till that point in our life! I finally managed to ask her for a video chat, and she surprisingly agreed. I don't know, but I began thinking that she might be a boy, pretending to be a girl, because that exact stuff had already happened with me earlier! After around a couple of months, we had our video chat, and I asked her this question, which had bugged me for the last week. 

"What do you think about your peer group?"

"Let me guess," she said.

"Guess? Don't you have a certain opinion of your peer group?"

"Yeah, I have. Let me guess why you asked this question"

"Ok, go ahead!" 

"You said your peer group, that you have started talking with a young lady from the UK, and you adore certain aspects of mine, which you made clear to them. Further, you have mentioned that in a few days there is going to be a video chat between us. All this led your peer group to think that there is a thing going on, though you wanted just a friend from a different land, nothing more?"

"Seriously you guessed this, or tell me the truth that you talked with my peers?"

"I guessed this"

"Now you would say that you also guessed the idea mentioned in the papers that you had published?"

"Yeah exactly. I guessed them, and then experimented, they gave wonderful results, so I wrote the paper. What else did you think?"

"What are you, some sort of super-girl?"

"Nah! I kind of good at guessing"

"Well then answer my original question"

"I feel that they are kind of responsible for our acts and decisions, they provide us a reason to try out things. But it ultimately comes to ourselves, we are responsible for what we think and do. They provide options, which we are not bound to choose from, but we are bound to know while forming an opinion"

It took me a few moments to process, how deep that opinion of her was. A smile came out of my mouth, and we continued to talk. I have finally made an International Friend!

-Siba Smarak Panigrahi