Q. I am a telecom engineer and I have worked in this company for over two-and-a-half years. I have made a few good friends who seem to be friends for life. Amongst them are two girls. We’re just friends, and they’ll get married and move out some day. One of my other friends is already moving out. I feel stagnant working here since there’s not much growth in my career path. I want to take up a job elsewhere and grow. But the thought that I have to leave the company and these few close friends is unbearable. Though I know that nothing is permanent, I’m not able to make a firm decision to move on. Please help me.
Ravi

When I first came to Mumbai from Hyderabad, I couldn’t get over a train ride past the Dharavi slums. It looked like one single roof. I wondered how people live there. How do they enter or exit? Two-year-old children were crawling just about three feet away from the railway tracks.

Original stories seem to be ignored like the plague in movieland. It’s always nice to have a Hollywood inspiration
Normally, I don’t dip into quotations and proverbs. Except while ticking off badly behaved children. But something was bugging me of late. And a chance discovery of a series of articles by a heavy-duty American screenwriter sorted out my bugaboo.

I am torn within. My girlfriend has left me, and all my buddies seem like rivals now, as she is calling all of them, chatting with them on FB, maybe even dating them. I have no friends left. I hate myself for what happened.
— A teen in a crisis

Here are examples of scenes and scripts lacking logic in the movies
While watching the movies, I’ve been zapped by certain baffling, puzzling, brain-busting elements. Here’s sharing some of the brain bogglers:

How true is it that you’re broke and have shifted from your office to a dilapidated building?
Not true. Actually I have shifted to under a tree and I now operate from a footpath.

Level Zero seems like some vague philosophy stuff. Give me an analogy I can understand. Why on earth should I practise some abstract thing? How is it going to help me?
— A teenager

It has always been a mystery to me why someone makes it in life and someone doesn’t. It is not as simple as possessing in-born talent or luck. I am certain that it has actually a lot to do with subconscious programming, not necessarily designed or intended.

Listen, I’m sure that actors from what is termed as “the South” in journalese, are distinctly audience-friendly. It’s just that they elect to debut, on the Bollywood front, in projects which give them short shrift. Self-publicity — a necessary evil — is also conspicuous by its absence.

When the world around me is boiling, what do you expect me to do?”
— Excerpt from a long letter from a teenager