Friends

Thank you Mrs Chairperson. Assalamualaikum and a very good morning to the panel of honourable judges, teachers and friends. On this fine morning, I would like to talk about “Friends”.

A friend is someone who knows the song in your heart, and can sing it back to you when you have forgotten the words. On this planet, who can not live without friends? Everyone needs friends. We need our peers to live our lives, to joke around, and to help us with our mischievous plots. Who would dare to tell an adult about our plans?

Friendship is a blessing, and a friend is the channel through whom great emotional and spiritual blessings flow. Friends will cheer us up when we are full of depression. With eyes full of sorrow, we are bound to get attention the moment our friends notice. We usually just want them to hang around with us, to have a good time, to act silly and just be ourselves.

Friends are like peanut butter and jelly. They always stick together. Who else other than your close friend would help you walk to the infirmary when you broke a foot while playing football? We always stick together anywhere we go. One of us never follows. We walk side by side. We treat ourselves as equals. Always be humble and never brag on things that you own. One would never treat the other like leaves on the ground. Good friends are precious and rare like diamonds. Good friends are very hard to find. We should never cast our friends aside.

Friends are like angels without wings. Some may be devils in disguise. We should never betray our friends’ secrets to the world of rumour-hungry people. As well as secrets, we should not cancel our get-together at the last minute.

There’s only a few minutes left until an exam starts. You realised that you haven’t memorised the important facts yet. Who else other than your closest buddy will sit next to you and repeat the words over and over again and hopefully remain in your brain for the next 60 minutes.

A lot of people go through life with only a few friends. It seems that some have less than that. They have no one they can call in good times or bad. There is no one with whom to bounce ideas around, or to talk about deep and troubling subjects. They have no one to call in times of need or difficulty. They are standing alone, being an outcast.

When we are bored, we could SMS our friends with our fingers at the speed of lightning. Or even go to their house to catch up with the latest gossip. For most tech-savvy people, they prefer going to chat rooms on the internet and interact with people of different experiences. Besides chatting, we are able to join networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace and Friendster. On these sites, we are able to search for long-lost friends as well as new people. These ways won’t make us lonely as we could interact with our friends in a different way.

As life goes on, we meet different people each time. Some turned out to be our buddies. Friends come and go. We lose some and gain a lot more. Some friends stay right by your side while others go the opposite way. Good or bad friends come and go. But there’s one thing for sure, we can not live without them.

With that, I thank you.