THE VALUE OF FRIENDSHIP
Today, world is a storm tossed, war weary, troubled world. It is engulfed in violence, hate and malice. To remove this treat we are basically in need of friendship. If the world is to be saved, it can only be on a basis of friendship – trust and mutual understanding. If we are to be saved from ourselves, it will be because we are willing to bear and for bear, give and take live and let live, in the name of friendship.
Friendship is kindness, sympathy and sacrifice combined. To realize the value of friendship, we must recollect those precious moments. When our friends fought our battles, rejoiced in our good fortune, wisely hinted of an impending danger and never betrayed our confidence in them.
A true friend is not easy to acquire. Euripides says ‘life has no blessing like a prudent friend. Friendship cannot be built with the intention of gaining something out of the relation. It can occur, as Dr. Johnson says; only where the superiority of one side is reduced by some equivalent advantage on the other, for friendship it has well been said, is the disinterested commerce between equals. In friendship, anything given is without reserve anything received is a privilege.
Friendship is not only a man to man relation. It warm the heart, tones up the life of the entire world. There would have been no violence in Middle East, no bloodshed in Vietnam, no cause of friction among the great powers, had everybody knows the value of friendship. Every war we perceive is a fight between two nations owing to conflicting principles of their leaders, which to most commoners signify little. There is a subtle thought behind the humor. ‘If two nation heads are at dispute, let them settle it with a bout and leave the people alone. What I want to drive at is that commoners would like to live in harmony and friendship if only their leaders realized the value of friendship and futility of war.
World’s supreme need is friendship that would provide us a much better world where it adopted and practiced to the fall. The values of friendship can be fully realized in Shakespeare’s entreaty “The friends those hast, and their adoption tried, grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel”.