My Dear Students | Auld Lang Syne: Importance of friendships in life

'Your friends are a part of your individual history, a slice of your life. You can no more disown them than disown yourself,' says Nigam Nuggehalli.

Nostalgia is no longer a powerful force in our culture. Auld Lang Syne is ultimately about nostalgia., says Nigam.

6 min readNew DelhiDec 31, 2023 11:11 AM IST First published on: Dec 31, 2023 at 11:11 AM IST

(‘My dear students’, a fortnightly column that is a conversation with young minds on current events, books, popular culture — just about anything that’s worth talking over a cup of coffee.)

My dear students,

As the year draws to a close, I want to draw your attention to a Scottish song that I, to my embarrassment, became acquainted with only in my thirties. I am sure all of you are familiar with the phenomenon where you have not read or seen or heard something that everyone else seems to have, and once you become familiar with it, you realise it is everywhere around you. For me, it was ‘Auld Lang Syne.’ The first two verses go like this:

Should old acquaintance be forgot,
And never brought to mind?
Should old acquaintance be forgot?
And auld lang syne?

For auld lang syne, my dear,
For auld lang syne,
We’ll take a cup of kindness yet,
For auld lang syne.

The rest of the song is a riff on the first two verses. Once I heard this song, sung by Lea Michele in the 2011 movie ‘New Year’s Eve’, I realised it’s everywhere. It’s ubiquitous at New Year’s Eve events in the Anglo Saxon world of course, including British colonies. But it’s also found in various versions in the Netherlands, Japan and Korea.

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If you ask me to tell you the meaning of this song, I am not quite sure how to go about it. In ‘When Harry met Sally’, the Meg Ryan character says it’s about old friends. I think that’s about right. Old friends. Don’t forget them. Your relatives are the bane of your existence (mostly). But your friends are your choosing (mostly). Treasure them while you can. I don’t know about you, but I find it difficult to be in touch with my childhood friends. It’s not that we are too busy or too distracted. I think it’s because we are becoming a bit more indifferent to our memories. Nostalgia is no longer a powerful force in our culture. Auld Lang Syne is ultimately about nostalgia.

I had a friend in my seventh grade in New Delhi. We navigated the vagaries of Delhi’s cricket fields and Delhi’s CBSE math syllabus, mysteries alike to both of us. But when I moved to Bangalore, I lost touch with him completely. In the pre-internet era, post cards really couldn’t sustain long distance friendships for too long.

In 2021, while Covid gave us all an enforced home stay, I googled his name on a lark. A first name corresponding to his first name came up in Himachal Pradesh. There were perhaps thousands with this first name in Himachal Pradesh alone. This person was a senior government officer in the education department. I went to the department website and called up the department on their land line. His secretary came on the line. I asked for his boss. He said his boss was in the field. I don’t know what came over the secretary but he gave me his boss’ mobile number. I am grateful he did so. I call the mobile number. A person picks it up. I introduce myself as Nigam. That’s it. He says hi Nigam, great to hear from you. After thirty-five years. A hi from my side and a hi from his. We start talking. We chat for an hour, and it seemed to us as if we were just returning from a cricket game moments ago.

What are friends for? In a way, it’s a wrong question to ask. Philosophers divide the value of things in our lives into two categories, instrumental and inherent. Things have instrumental value for us when we use these things to get what we want. Things have inherent value when just having these things have value for us, regardless of what we do with them. I would like to think that friendships have inherent value, Our colleagues, teachers, neighbours, and partners fulfil instrumental needs in our lives but their value is not exhausted in these needs. They can and should be our friends as well, bringing value to our lives just because we are associated with each other, not only because the association brings with it material benefits.

I remember a dear friend once telling me that all friends are basically figures of convenience. You make friends from work or from your neighbourhood or from your batch. They are your friends because they fit conveniently into your lifestyle. All this talk of inherent value is a camouflage for a more convenient life. I tend to disagree. Causal explanations of friendships might well be on the mark, but that’s missing the point. It doesn’t really matter how two friends came to be friends, it’s the fact that they share a relationship that enriches both their lives that’s worth valuing.

Your friends are a part of your individual history, a slice of your life. You can no more disown them than disown yourself. This New Year’s Eve, for old times sake, raise a toast to your friends, particularly the friends you grew up with, for they were there when you needed them, and when you didn’t need them; they were there, and that’s often times enough.