Friend or classfellow?

'Do you want to be my friend?'

This question was posed to me in the first weeks of my university time at the Quaid-I-Azam university. I was stunned, looking at the girl, same age as me, dressed in a suiting shalwar kamize, holding onto her shoulder bag. I am not used to making friends like this. In my world: you talk, in one way or another superficial or more personal, you might meet up for a tea together, you're doing sports or just happen to be in the same queue or in the same course or whatever: but a friendship is never such a conscious decision as a mobile phone contract: please sign here.

This is why I decided to investigate and understand what kind of conditions would follow by deciding for or against a friendship.

She explained:

Either you are a friend or a classfellow. A classfellow are all of the people that happen to be in your year of university or in your courses. You exchange information about the courses, about the professors or the research topics. But if you are friends with someone, then you share everything.

Ok, I thought, that doesn't sound too bad. Why not be friends with her.

BUT

(and then follows the big BUT)

being friend with someone means NOT to be a friend with someone else. There are different circles of friends that exclude each other. If you decide in being friends with one group, this also means to work exclusively with them together for university exams, to help and support them and to shun others.

A bit more complicated, mh?

Yes, especially when you get to a new place and you don't know the people and have to decide whom you belong to, without knowing who and how these people are.

My university semester turned out to be more of a social studies year, in which pakistani society and psyche was more reflected in a micro cosmos than I had expected to be. The tendency to gossip (even if you just explain the university homework to a male classfellow will not be unnoted), combined with the games the groups played with each other had found a perfect victim: me.

I found myself more than once in the position to revise decisions because my 'friends' had asked me to, torn between the different groups whom I had contact to all along. I learned. Not only from the studies but while studying with these people in the way they treated me. And if I have to be stripped down to honesty: I found great research topics, interesting information and classfellows. Friends were rare under the coditions of competition and the chosen time limited community that they formed. But still to be found if searched after ;-)