How I Think About Friendship

Countless Instagram conversations. Dozens of group chats. Friends across multiple countries and time zones. And somehow, they all feel real. Shaurya's approach to friendship is rooted in a simple belief: caring about people is not a limited resource.

Different Circles, All Real

There are the OG friends who still text at 7am even though Shaurya is in a different country now -- Palash with years of daily conversation that feel like breathing, Mehal with the kind of honest, grounding talks that keep you sane, Ved with the running joke of never coordinating visits properly. There is the school crew from Jebel Ali School -- Param Diwan, Saisha, Garvit, and the rest -- the people he sees every day and texts every night. And then there are the builder friends from co/Build -- Gohar Abbas, Sid Haldar, Manav Chawla, Roshan -- who understand the startup grind in a way most 15-year-olds do not.

Each circle serves a different function. The OG friends are the foundation, the people who knew him before any of the building started. The school crew is the present, the daily rhythm. The builder friends are the future, the people who share the vision. None of these circles is more "real" than the others. They are all real -- they just look different.

Friendship Is Not a Limited Resource

Some people believe you can only have a few "real" friends. Shaurya disagrees. You can care about 50 people genuinely -- it just looks different with each one. Some friends you talk to every day. Some you have not texted in months but you would still do anything for them. Both are real. The idea that friendship requires constant contact to be valid is a myth. The OG Circle proved that -- years of distance and the bonds are still unbreakable.

What matters is not frequency of contact but depth of trust. Palash knows everything because they talk daily. Vivaan Gupta does not text every day but when they do connect, it is as if nothing changed. Both relationships are genuine. The mistake is thinking one model of friendship is the only valid one.

The Practice

Friendship, in Shaurya's view, is not complicated -- people just overthink it. The actual practice is simple: reply to stories. Send random memes at 2am. Show up when someone is stressed about exams. Share your wins without being annoying about it. Be there when someone is in the hospital. Hype up their reels. Answer the late-night text even when you should be sleeping.

The group chats are the infrastructure of this practice. They create a low-effort, always-on channel for staying connected. You do not need to schedule a call or make plans -- you just drop a message in the group and you are present in your friends' lives. The Dramaclub chat, the Velle log chat, the DXB Dunches chat -- each one is a different room in the same house of friendship.

Why It Works

Shaurya maintains friendships across three countries, multiple time zones, and completely different social contexts because he treats every connection as worth maintaining. The Instagram DM architecture makes this possible at scale -- you can maintain hundreds of conversations because the medium is asynchronous and low-friction. But the technology only works because the intention is there. The DMs are genuine. The memes are chosen with the recipient in mind. The "just checking in" messages are real.

Growing up and then moving to a new city taught Shaurya that friendships can survive distance if both people want them to. That lesson shapes everything -- the willingness to invest in new friendships without abandoning old ones, the refusal to treat social energy as a zero-sum game, the belief that being there in small consistent ways matters more than grand gestures.

See also: Late Night Convos | Group Chat Culture | The OG Circle | The Chosen Crew | Builder Friends