I am eternally thankful to the various online groups and forums I am part of, for giving me friends for life. I found Prason Christoper Robin through Hi5 which was like grandfather of Facebook. Facebook gave friends in bundles and like any good fertile land, it came with its weeds. It took me few years to take those weeds out and voila what remains with me is pure gold.
Even though we meet online sometimes with few people there will be instant connect. May be it is the same way we think or speak or the same books we read. If it was not for social networking site, I am sure I wouldn’t have been friends with this man called Gils. I would have intimidated by all his achievements, intellect and class. I now know him close to four and half years now. I really don’t remember how we met first and how the friendship developed. My earliest memory with him is, he saying with authority that I should be there with him on both the days of his marriage.
Now his son is one and half years. Once for his birthday, I didn’t know what to gift him so I wanted to learn more about him. I started reading his blog posts and at that time it had more than 700 posts. It didn’t feel like that many posts at all when I finished reading. But I had spent almost eight hours in his blog. We started sharing books, both physical and electronic copies. When I was waiting to hear from publishers last year about the fate of ‘300 days’, I hesitantly gave the manuscript to him. He kept on emailing what he thought as the day progressed and a very long email as crit once he finished reading the whole novel. It really gave me the confidence to take self publish route. I am happy to say that he is one of the people who gets to read my stories before it goes to publishing.
I am glad that he thinks me as one in his family. I cannot thank him enough for it. When I went through our shared moments in photographs, I was there during almost all good times during past three years. I hope we will have more such years of friendship together and I will keep disturbing him with phone calls which he never attends and invite him to places where he could never find directions.
Happy Birthday Gils. Thanks for tolerating me.
