Who is a bondhu?
Who is a bondhu? I ran into a bondhu today and the person expressed some confusion about the word. And that got me thinking. Indeed, I use the word frequently in my writing, and way back I had tried to clarify what it means. But perhaps it is time to revisit the unique relationship that the term implies. The crude translation to English is “friend,” but it is closer to the Italian word “Paisan” the rustic, the peasant, although the Italians would focus on nationality, the word “bondhu” represents not a person but an emotion. A bondhu once reminded me that even things have emotion and that is true of a bondhu. A bondhu is a person with whom you can sit over a solitary cup of coffee and spend hours that seem like a blink of an eye. Time goes by with a bondhu, because you can look each other in the eye and see congruence. With a bondhu, a debate, even argument, eventually leads to a happy place. A bondhu makes you happy. There are no pretensions, no attenuation of behavior, no judgment, a