Recently, I celebrated my 30th and in this picture below I have friends whom I've known for 26 long years. Some of us here are friends from since we were just 4 years old! This weekend was amazing because I spent it with them and I have more memories with some of the best people in my life.

A couple of people in the picture joined my class a little later but we've been through thick and thin together at school. Every time we have a get-together there's some new stories to share and many old ones to recollect. My weekend was all about this. Some of us hit our 30th this year and some will do in matter of weeks and months.

The guy in the blue shirt above me is one of my closest friends. We've had this dream of being self-employed or an entrepreneur towards the latter half of our college life. Somewhere deep inside we wanted to do things differently. We know we'd face a lot of obstacles doing it but we never gave up trying to do what we believe in.

It was my dream to be able to work out of anyplace and have the flexibility of living like a digital nomad if I choose to and he wanted to start his own small-medium scale industry. Yesterday, he and I raised a toast to living our dream. It took us both many years of hardship to get this far and it takes a lot of work everyday to do the things we want to do.

But I think it's great that we've been able to do it. To live a life on our terms is a privilege and it takes a lot of hard work and effort to be able to do it the way you want to! You have to learn to accept failures along with the successful moments. I think we've gotten around to understanding this aspect of our lives which has gotten us this far.

My little group of friends from school come from different professional and personal backgrounds. Suffice to say, we weren't born with a silver spoon but we worked our way up in this world.

Professionally, one is an engineer, someone else an IT professional working for a top firm. Two are self-employed including myself, two are home makers who also manage a family business and we also have a banker/photographer amongst us.

Another one of my close friends from school is an urban planner but she's in Singapore and couldn't be with us on this meet. But i'll resume my travel-logs soon and you'll get to read my stories traveling with her in Singapore soon. I left it half way when I reached Lisbon, for Steemfest 2017 and never managed the time after that to go through the pics and write up my logs.

Anyways, back in school we'd never have imagined that we'd stay connected after all these years. Infact, when we left school there was no social media. Orkut was just getting popular in India and we didn't have a mobile phone. Some of us didn't even have a computer at home. We used to call each other up on landlines to plan anything or just land up at the house to meet.

Overtime, we moved cities because of college and work life and it took a few years of gap before things settled down enough for us to get back to each other and make effort to meet on a regular basis. Technology made it easier, more than ever before to stay connected. Like everyone else, we have our Whatsapp group now and it's easy to plan now. Facebook helps us stay updated as well.

It's important to have friends and I'm lucky to have a few whom I can trust completely with just about anything from my life.

Personally, my best memories from growing up are filled some of the people in these pictures. My school days were just awesome and it's great to have these people in my life as time goes on. They seem to have tagged along permanently for this amazing journey through life and I'm grateful for their company!

If you have such friends I'd love to hear your stories and see any pictures you want to share in a post or comment. If you write a post, feel free to link me up in the comments below.

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