I find myself caught in one of those "circles of life" — not like the big happy ones seen in The Lion King but rather the type that you keep living through, over and over and over again. You can't jump out. You just keep trying things in hopes that the circle would, at least, widen or in hopes that you will be pulled out.

Let's be honest: the great life is saved for the elite. Recently I read an article stating that opportunity is not about luck, it is about money. Wealth attracts wealth. How often are the destitute saved from their poverty and given a lifetime of success? It happens. However, it does not happen often. Especially not now when talent is everywhere.

Thanks to globalization, talent is no longer unique. One can learn skills in simple DIY steps for free. In the good old days, rare gems were discovered among the wild; people could manipulate others easily and make them believe that their skills were sought worldwide; Bartolomeu Dias even "discovered" an entire country and returned to Portugal to brag about his findings, regardless of the inhabitants that had already been living there for years. Today, everything can be cross referenced; gems can be located and purchased without one having to leave their own comforts; the cheapest option can be found with a click  and the world is no longer a mystery to anyone.

I find myself  sitting at my computer, once again questioning the point of it all. I spent the last 17 years studying; I now have two degrees, a wealth of useless knowledge, and no job. I would like to believe that the recession is to blame, but the truth is, I don't have the qualifications for most of the jobs that I want.

I've done the three years in retail working in an airless store room. I've saved up, I've splurged, and now I'm broke and wondering what to do next with little hope left in the dream that I have held onto since a child.

My friend suggested that I take a leap of faith and start my own movie business. "Move towards your dream and all shall fall into place," she had advised.

You need money to start your own business. You need money to get into the famous and recognized film schools that are guaranteed to land you your dream career. The movie business is strictly for the elite. To apply for financing you need a convincing business and marketing plan. You need a business. To register your business and website and get yourself on your feet, you need money. Renting equipment is sometimes more expensive than buying your own equipment. Almost nothing is affordable. It's as if I am doomed to be a slave to the system.

Education -> average job -> mediocre life.

Those words of my guidance teacher reverberate at the back of my head hauntingly: "You can have your dreams, Tharuna, but they have to be sensible."

In South Africa, the film industry is small. Only the best, the ones who could afford the private educational institutions, have a real chance of getting in. And only the "previously disadvantaged" are given free opportunities. The middle class have to fight for it. The problem is that my past is like an overly decorated Christmas tree with bad investments (people included). I would be all teeth and claw if I knew that this, starting my own movie business, was the right decision. That I could trust my partner. That there was a guarantee that people would be willing to finance a girl with only a dream and some talent.

There is no guarantee, is there?

Tharuna Devchand

You are encouraged to think, for a change. In the Indian education system I suffered through for three years (my high school years), I was pushed to learn everything "by heart" and not to think about why and how. You are essentially trained to be a mirror, just showing the world what your text book shows to you.

But not all is bad with the Indian education system. Math and pure science education is much better than in the U.S. or Europe (at least at the high school level). The labs and equipment, however, are a different story. At the college level, because of the emphasis on being a mirror, the quality of math and science training falls. That is why, despite having thousands of very hardworking and diligent students, India is not a powerhouse when it comes to research and development.

In light of these facts, it is quite surprising that the U.S. government is not promoting its universities as universal talent magnets. Look at how Australia markets itself as the place to be for international students. With tough rules on employment limitations, U.S. universities are actually losing talent to Europe, Australia, and Asia.

Fore more on Australia's efforts to attract foreign students, check out this website. Why can't the U.S. do the same?

Bhumika Ghimire

Being a Valentine's Day non-enthusiast by rule, I surprised myself today by wearing a pink dress and entering a shopping mall to watch the movie Valentine's Day with my friends (all Valentine's Day groupies). The movie — which I likened to Love Actually and was keen to see — turned to out to be a confirmation that Valentine's Day is indeed a shallow, commercialized, and manipulative celebration of everything but love (a viewpoint that, until now, I have been reluctant to agree with).

For one, all the lead actresses in the movie were abnormally skinny and all the men (even the geeky ones) were clean shaven, slim, and somewhat defined. In fact, the entire cast seemed to be chosen according to how good they looked naked — the men barely kept their shirts on and the women strutted around in tiny skirts or their men's oversized shirts. Additionally, the quality of acting was equivalent to the quality of materials used in low-cost housing. With the movie having an equally poor plot (or rather, too many poor plots), I wished that I had rather spent my Sunday morning helping assemble ill-suited materials to build low-cost houses for those who are poverty stricken. I would have seen more love doing the latter than I did during the entire 125 minutes of Valentine's Day.

The movie asserted the view that love is indeed shallow. In one "loving" relationship, Taylor Swift plays a ditzy, conceited school girl going out with Taylor Lautner because he was hot and athletic and, wait for it, he stayed with her and "loved" her regardless. Watching her act made me feel as if someone was massaging my eyes with sandpaper and left me with that I-know-why-Lautner-broke-up-with-Swift-in-reality feeling. Even more experienced actresses like Jennifer Garner failed to evoke any emotions in the viewer due to the haphazard plot sequence, ill-developed characters, and the lack of true love. Garner's character, who initially asserts that she had found "the one," simply dismisses the fact that this aforementioned "one" was in fact married with kids and simply moves on to loving her best friend. In another love story, child star Bryce Robinson spends the entire day waiting for his flowers to be delivered so that he may pass it on to his love. In a cheap twist, it turns out that the boy has a crush on his teacher. This problem is solved in five minutes after a one-on-one heart-to-heart in which the teacher offers him a more suitable recipient and Robinson moves on to deliver his long awaited bouquet to his same-aged best friend.  In this way, former loves were continually dismissed within seconds and replaced with better options which ultimately reinforced everything that love is not. Moreover, all love stories failed to contain even a gram of true romance: lines were cheap, characters were easy, and objects of affection could simply be purchased. Also, nobody truly cries when they have their hearts torn to pieces (in my own relationships, knowing that the guy I loved was a jerk never stopped me from drowning my room in tears). The only poignant line in the movie was delivered by Shirley MacLaine (the old wise one), who stated that when you love someone, you love them for their entirety and not only for the good bits. Sadly, this line fell into a deep haystack, lost in our inability to engage with any of the characters (there were just so many!) and their inability to truly love.

The saddest part of the whole movie was that it accurately represented the reality of most Valentine's Day followers (and even haters, perhaps). In my own experience, the first Valentine's Day that I remember was when I was 11. I was the lonely girl who had chosen to follow the steps of Mr. Bean and send myself a Valentine's Day card. I remember hating myself because I thought that only the pretty and popular ones deserved to be pampered on Valentine's Day. Having then attended an all girls high school, Valentine's Day always began with the delivering of roses to and from schools of the opposite sex and always ended with me watching the 'special' girls glowing behind their bunches of roses (allegedly, the amount of roses that you received on Valentine's Day equated to how popular you would be perceived by your peers). By the time that I had reached campus, I had grown into a Valentine's Day hater, spreading the words "love sucks" to all who cared to listen while secretly wishing that someone among the six billion would be spending the day thinking about only me.

Today, however, after watching Valentine's Day, I feel a sense of joy knowing that, in 23 years, I had not once received a Valentine's Day gift nor spent the day celebrating love. I'd like to think that love is more than everything that Valentine's Day represents and that romance still lives within the fast-paced and technological confines of contemporary society. Maybe I am just another dreamer who has read one too many Nicholas Sparks novels…I'd rather dream than settle.

Tharuna Devchand

There is a beautiful mansion near my apartment which is on the National Historic Register. Built in 1900 for William Childs (developer of Bon Ami cleaning powders), it sits on the grand avenue of once-private residences directly across from the park. Now the mansion is home to the Brooklyn Society for Ethical Culture, a non-profit group hosting various programs and seminars. Not too long ago, they installed a banner out front stating that they are against torture. Did I miss something here?

Of course they are against torture. Who wouldn't be? Who is going to stand up and disagree with that? (No, actually I am all for torture.) Why restate the obvious? It's kind of like announcing you think Hitler was a bad man.

This leads me to the recent announcement by the MTA to let straphangers know that groping on the subway is wrong. Correctamundo, MTA! It seems safe to say that there are certain things we all know are wrong. Fondling your neighbor on the subway is one of them. But the MTA is spending a good bit of money rolling out a campaign to tell us this anyway. They want to encourage riders not to be afraid to speak up after a study showed that 63 percent of women have been sexually harassed on the subway. There will be a hotline to report such unpleasantness. But all good intentions aside, can this really even curb the problem?

A similar campaign on the Boston T resulted in an increase of reported incidents, which is to be expected, but there was no increase in apprehending the offenders. It all boils down to a he said/she said kind of thing. I mean, it's not like the guy leaves any fingerprints.

Full disclosure: I have only been groped on a particularly crowded section of Bourbon Street during Mardi Gras but never on the subway. As your faithful subway reporter, I took an informal poll. Only one friend had a tale to tell. She boarded the 2 train at 14th Street during the evening rush. Everyone was crowded and pushing their way in, kind of like the subway in Japan where the conductors will "help" you by using your body as leverage to squeeze more people on the train. (I suspect these women need the groping hotline more than anyone.)

My friend was subway surfing, where you don't have a pole to hang onto or a door to lean against — you're just riding the wave of the train. A heavyset, tall man was facing her. Every time the train jerked and lurched forward, she felt what she described as an elbow poking her. It was hard to tell exactly what — an elbow? Someone's backpack? — because the train was so crowded. She insisted I mention here that she was wearing a long coat which did its part to camouflage the offending poker. She started to get suspicious. Was it? Wasn't it? Then her apprehension was confirmed. The train stopped moving but the poking didn't. I asked if she would have called to report the incident if there were a hotline back then. She doubted it. "What good would it have done?"

Maybe hotlines like this aren't really meant to catch the wrongdoer but provide some false sense of security to the rest of the riders. We want to feel like something is being done. We insist upon action. Not doing something, anything, despite how ridiculously futile, is the equivalent of letting the offenders win. Reminds me of the random bag searches the local police conducted here after the London bombings. With seven million riders each day, what did they really expect to find in the backpack of Joe Commuter? But it made us feel better, even if just for a few moments.

Jacquelin Cangro

I woke up on New Year's Day in a rather conventional manner: lungs recovering from high exposure to secondhand smoke, wallet empty, choked back tequila aftertaste, and a head full of hope. It was a completely new disposition for me. There were no resolutions for change and betterment; only ends and beginnings.

I thought that this was my own revelation. I imagined everyone else was hurrying to find ways to better themselves: joining gyms, throwing out their bottles of alcohol and packs of cigarettes, and penciling their families and friends into their busy schedules. But, I realized that I was wrong.

Like animals, humans have set behavioral patterns. For example, cats have their own personalities: some are wild and anti-social, some love human attention, some are afraid of heights…but ultimately, they all act in a certain way. They play in the same way, they all bury their excrement, they all learn how to clean themselves even when there is no adult cat to teach them. They are inherently conditioned to behave as cats.

With the Internet allowing people to connect from all over the world, we are more aware of our world, more knowledgeable about other cultures and nationalities, more open (in most cases) to differences between us, and more willing to help.  It has made the world a smaller place and has made me reassess my own uniqueness.

Being a diehard for the movie Fight Club, I never considered myself to be truly unique; however, I did assume that I had my own quirkiness that separated me from everyone else. This assumption was soon shattered while scrolling through various Facebook groups. Things that I considered to be uniquely me, things that I had thought only I did had groups with over a million followers. Things such as constantly calling my mum even though I didn't need her for anything; making animal noises in shopping malls and laughing at strangers who turn around; and thinking, as a little girl, that the moon followed me wherever I went.

We are all different, yet we are all the same. If nothing else, knowing this makes stand-up comedy easier.

Tharuna Devchand

Hi. My name is Tharuna and I am "addicted" to social networking sites. There are two in particular: Twitter and Facebook. My friend believes that these sites have become the new alcohol/cigarettes/shopping sprees with added benefits like lower cost, easy access, and greater satisfaction. This provides one explanation for why they are spreading like an ink stain, barrier-less and reaching all age groups, races, and social classes.

There are many reasons for craving the use of social networking sites. In the rapid paced world that we live in, the giving of attention to those who want it is scarce. With global financial and employment calamities, most parents are working harder and leaving their children somewhat neglected. With women striving to reach the sky of the corporate world, relationships tend to be strained while partners become more demanding. Even parents tend to be neglected by their working-class offspring.

Social network sites, on the other hand, are attention-giving whores. They suck in people who are lonely or shy or depressed and provide them with instantly gratifying attention. You have the ability to chat with new people when the old ones have grown tired of you and subsequently get rid of them when you have grown wary of their tales by simply pressing "delete." No long, drawn-out explanations required and, if you were clever enough to not give out your details, no Cable Guy-type stalkers to ruin your life. It's clean. It's simple. It's a social happy pill.

However, at the same time, it breeds a society of demanding and conceited narcissicists. In the realm of the Internet, we become our own celebrities. We fragment ourselves in the same way celebrities do, sometimes creating whole new personalities online. We believe that our stories and daily activities are important and interesting enough for the world to know. We get sad when people fail to acknowledge and be amused by our outpourings. In a way, we have become our own gods, begging to be worshipped. The more friends or followers you have, the greater you are.

Avid site users are generally aware of their addictions. Like all addictions — be it smoking, drinking, eating, loving, or shopping — there are long-term effects that ultimately change you.

Hmmm…Maybe I should detox.

Tharuna Devchand

Some years ago, a co-worker had accompanied a friend as moral support to a band audition. My co-worker, M, saw a lovely-looking guy exiting the audition room with a saxophone. She worked up the nerve to introduce herself and they chatted about random things: the weather, the L train, the Beatles vs. the Stones, and then the friend was called to perform. During the hubbub, they went their separate ways and never exchanged phone numbers. This is not an unusual story, except for what happens next.

But first there's a little something you should know about M. She was a helpless romantic. She believed in Prince Charming and messages in bottles and that all you need is love. She had plans to get married at Cinderella's castle with Jiminy Cricket singing "When You Wish upon a Star." For Halloween she always dressed as a princess. She was the original daydream believer.

Knowing this, it may not come as a surprise that in the days following her chance encounter, M pined for the sax player. She dreamed of the perfection that was him and before the week was out she'd picked names for their three kids. She finally called the company that had hosted the audition and begged for his phone number. The receptionist must have admired M's chutzpah. She relayed the message to Mr. Sax Player and gave him M's number. He called her and they went on a date. (By the way, this scenario is only remotely plausible if you are in your early 20s like M and her sax-playing man. Then it's earnest and heady and just a touch clandestine. After a certain age it kind of crosses the line to desperate and stalkerish.)

It's not just M who was fabulously optimistic in her pursuit of true love. Patrick Moberg proved me wrong (see "When a woodchuck could chuck wood post, June 3) and fell head over heels on the 5 train a few months ago.

Moberg isn't alone in his search for Ms. Right. Just yesterday there were 100 posts on Craigslist in NYC searching for a "missed connection," whether that took place on a platform or in a Starbucks. Let's say you saw your future husband on the subway but, for whatever reason, you couldn't speak to him. Just post an ad and sit back until your honey comes a-calling.

"i think you live in greenpoint because i've seen you maybe 3 times on the G. you were wearing a blue shirt and white shorts maybe, with long dirty blonde hair in a pony tail. you had a bag that said "ralph" on it. you got off at 5th ave and it saddened me. i've got dark hair, i was wearing jeans and a green collared shirt. i don't think you'll read this, but hopefully next time i will be courageous and make the damn move."

"It was Saturday night around 10 pm at the 2 or 3 train going to brooklyn. You had a slimless shirt with white and blue stripes, some blue jeans and some tennis shoes with a roster logo. I tried to keep eye contact from you, i was wearing some shorts and a green tshirt. I got off the Eastern park way museum stop. I wanted to say hi and talk to you"

"me: at the southern end of the car. Glasses large photo bag. Kept looking your way. You: other end of car. Blue dress. Red hair. Kept looking my way, thought it was at me, could be wrong though. A clown got on the car at union or ninth." (My note: only in NY)

Alas, it seems that you would have a better chance of finding true love at a "foot and back rub" place on the Lower East Side. Moberg wasn't going to take any chances on the love of his life. He decided to create a webpage to find his lady: www.nygirlofmydreams.com. In a city of eight million people, it took him 48 hours to find said girl of his dreams, one Camille Hayton, living in Brooklyn, originally from Melbourne, Australia. Hayton's girlfriend spotted her sketched likeness on the website and called her.

The results? My former co-worker M married — someone else — and apparently is pregnant with their first baby. Moberg and Hayton dated for two months, but they've decided to "just be friends."

An "A" for effort to all parties involved. It gets me thinking. Maybe someone is looking for me and I don't even know it! I wonder what my ad would look like.

You: Gurl with ipod dozing on 2 train. U R so k-ute. Don't worry. It's ok.

(See the "You are so cute" post, October 15.) 

Jacquelin Cangro

At Change.org, there is an honest look into "The Myth of Public Education" by Megan Greenwell:

"But that notion of public universities increasingly belies a less-attractive truth: many public colleges are too expensive for even middle-class students, and they're not providing enough financial aid. A study out this month from advocacy group The Education Trust underscores the growing problem: rising tuition and changing priorities for financial aid have priced many poor students out of their states' flagship public universities. As Kati Haycock, president of The Education Trust, wrote in the report, 'No longer widely accessible, their treasure is bestowed disproportionately on the children of America's economic and political elites.'"

 At the same site, there is also an article about America's drop-out epidemic. Marian Wright Edelman says:

"One-size-fits-all school zero tolerance disciplinary policies are responsible for the growth in the number of school-based arrests of poor and minority children, funneling them into the juvenile and criminal justice systems at younger and younger ages. So many are suspended, expelled, even arrested, for nonviolent infractions such as being 'disruptive' or 'disrespectful.' In the past, many of these problems would have been resolved in the principal's office or referred to a pastor or social worker or by calling the parent (who may no longer be in the house). Too many children today end up with an arrest record and are labeled a troublemaker, increasing the likelihood of dropping out of school."

No surprise that some professors and scientists routinely say that kids in India and China will take over America in the next decade. Next week we will look into Indian and Chinese education systems and why so many foreign students want to attend U.S. universities.

Bhumika Ghimire