With all the Whatsapp, Facebook, Hike etc statuses saying Happy Friendship Day with their best friend's name and a smiling emoticon, I understood that the day has come to celebrate Friendship.
On other days do we celebrate Enmity?
Firstly, as the tradition says a Very Happy Friendship Day.
But a question is arising in my mind repeatedly for the last three years. What is so special about this day? Why should we only wish those friends with whom we had studied five years ago and we did not meet ever after? Why this one day?
Is it a way to help us revive our friendship or is it a way increase profits of big firms waiting only for such days?
So today in the First Post of Ultimate Logics, let us Crash Friendship Day.
The term means a day dedicated to friends but we are with them for the rest 364 days too. Here we are talking about school and college goers as they are the only ones who can carry on this tradition. These students, especially college students, are nearly always with friends. So what is that special on that day?
Let us analyse.
Joyce Hall, a well-known business man, founder of Hallmark Cards, was the one to originally coin this idea of Friendship Day in sometime around 1930. He planned to promote this idea in such a way that everyone celebrates it by exchanging greeting cards so that his business does not slow down. The idea was taken well for the first few years but eventually it died in the US, as the population understood that this was a marketing method.
Friendship Day was still observed in some Asian and European countries, in some way or the other, but the fire did not die out.
Later in 1958, Dr. Ramón Artemio Bracho, a Paraguayan national, was having dinner with his friends and thought if they could do something different by creating World Peace through the observance of an International Friendship Day. This gave birth to 'Cruzada Mundial de la Amistad' (World Friendship Crusade). The group planned to celebrate it in a big way on the same day the following year. The event was big success, backed by giant companies who were willing to promote such events to boost their sales. The event is celebrated till date in Paraguay in the same way and mood of festivity.
With the support of European and Asian countries, Dr. Bracho and his team moved step by step to promote the day.
They started lobbying The United Nations(UN). First success that they met was in 1998 when in an event co-sponsored by The United Nations Department of Public Information and Disney Enterprises on Friendship Day acknowledged Winmie the Pooh(a well known cartoon character) as the World's Ambassador of Friendship at The UN. Playing its part Disney too had its share of the profits in the future.
Until 2011 they failed again repeatedly, but in the 65th session of The UN in 2011 the assembly declared that the body and its member states shall observe 30th July as International Friendship Day.
Talking about the present, with the advent and rise of social media platforms the practice of exchanging cards and flowers has been done away with. Nowadays institutions like hookah parlours, restaurant, movie halls and obviously bars benefit from the occasion.
Put on your thinking caps and think.
With so much of money and so many industrialists involved in the rise of the tradition how can one think that this occasion is for the true feeling of friendship and not for the monetary returns. The notion with which Dr. Bracho established the basis of the occasion was undoubtedly for the good but if we see the situation from another point of view we may end up with different results. If the same method was followed by Joyce Hall(founder of Hallmark Cards) with someone else on the crease batting for him and he could just have been sitting in the pavilion and backing the face of the movement, wouldn't we still have been following the same traditions?
