A Rolling Stone Gathers No Moss.

I would dedicate this article to my only best friend I had in school. Unfortunately, I wasn't hers, so years after our divisions in class changed, the bond of friendship weakened enough to no more remain taut. Then one fine day we happened to again reunite through a social networking site and after suspending our casual meeting for weeks we finally managed to conduct one.

I cherished it. We could expatiate in length about what we did so far in years, how we did it, what happened to our lives and how they have taken turns. The talks seemed ad infinitum. We both had now become earning members of the society, while the girl came out with a lot of difficult times than what normally one has to go through or to be precise what i went through.

I was deeply moved by the conversations I had with her. Even today, when society has progressed so rapidly, it came as a great surprise to me to know that her conventional family background expected a girl her age to get married and have kids with someone not well qualified but having a government job with a below average salary in bucolic parts of the country. And even if the guy there earned less then what she did here, it din't matter, because after marriage she was destined to stay at home nurturing the kids.

Drifting back to village area looked more viable for her family because either boys in town from her community weren't that well educated, surprisingly, not even as much as she was or the educated ones demanded too much dowry. To me all this sounded ludicrous because I have been brought up in a culture where I was always treated on par with my brother. What I could sense in her case was completely different.

My friend's family completely shunned her for trying to study beyond her bachelors degree. So, withstanding duress by her family, my friend decided to stand all on her own. Starting with taking home tuitions to small time jobs, she gathered some money to begin and complete her fashion designing course; all at the cost of her family's wrath and without anyone's support, neither financial nor moral.

I really salute her indomitable and iconoclastic spirit which shows that 'a rolling stone gathers no moss'. She decided not to surrender to her parents wishes of throwing her into a sea of unknown just because she's a girl and that's what her destiny should be. Today she works as a fashion designer in a decent firm and I could see it in her eyes that she wants to make things much better for her and down the line someday for her daughter when she'll have one.

At the end of the day we decided to stroll to a nearby mall and visit the 'home furnishing division' there. She showed me all that she wanted to buy to decorate her impending house she would buy someday with her own earned money. Seating on the best of the collection of couches there she told me, "Priyanka, bas I'm buying this one, thodese paise kama lu, ek ghar bana lu, fir toh isko hi leke jaungi." I smiled at her and said, "Ya, sure you will."

After so many years I found my one time best friend confident, determined, courageous, hopeful and a fighter by spirit, beautifully designing her destiny by scoffing at her fate.