Driving

I love driving. When I was in India, I had a 180 cc bike that I loved taking out for a spin every day. Here, in the US, driving is a fairly stress free task because of the gear-free cars that are the status quo of the country. The past three days have been amazing because I’ve driven on the highway, hills and in rainy weather at night. It’s been an amazing journey but the one thing that has been driving me crazy is the speed. The standard speed on the Boulder-Denver highway is 65 mph (miles per hour) but in my Indian mind, it translates to about 105 kmph. That’s a lot of speed! While driving, the first reaction I’ve always had is that I don’t want to make any mistakes. A mistake at this speed means a definite accident. That one thought in mind is such a killjoy that I’ve been scared for most of my driving time. The last time I’ve driven, this very evening, at last, I was confident that I’m driving well and that I’ll not make any mistakes.

Perhaps, in a few more drives, I’ll be very comfortable with my driving and it’s other aspects, specially, the speed.

A Week in Masters

Tuesday feels like Thursday’s here
Thursday feels like weekend’s near
Sunday feels like it should be Friday night
And Monday feels like a hell of a ride!!!

Repeat.

I’d like to say that my blog has shifted to blog.nitinkhanna.com

Also, can someone make a tune to go along with this? Post your videos in the comments please 🙂

Rehab

Hi, I’m Nitin Khanna and I’m an addict. But I’m glad to say that today, I’ve been free of my addiction since one month.

Yes, I’m addicted to M&Ms and yes, I’m making progress. The temptation has been huge. Every time I go to the supermarket, they peep from behind the stalls. Sometimes, they look at me with their gleaming eyes and disc-like shape from beneath the vitamin water stalls or pounce at me near the billing area. But I have avoided them for so long and will continue to do so. You can too.

Welcome to M&Ms Rehab.

Just 7 days

Hello all, just wanted to pop in and say that I now am acutely aware that there are just 7 days remaining in my stay in India. It’s been a great month and no matter how much I hate the heat, you just gotta love India!!!

In other news, I am the new owner of nitinkhanna.com thanks to the diligence of my brother Nipun. He just pounced on that domain name like it was a glass of hot water and a plate of fruits ( yeah, my brother is not the same!!!). Thanks to him, whenever you all go to nitinkhanna.com it’ll bring you here. That’s not half- bad is it? 🙂

I guess I’ll do something with the website later, maybe host my resume on it with my profile and details. But for now, in these last few days, a rainy Delhi awaits me, both outside the house and within.

Logging out,
Nitin Khanna

enchanté

It’s always fun to celebrate a birthday, more so when it’s your own. And so, it’s my birthday today and so is Rahul Manelkar, Sonali Singhandhupe, Sumit Bansal and Neha Bindra‘s. It has been a wonderful celebration till now, with a lot of good surprises coming my way, both edible and wearable (thanks Nipun bhaiya for this awesome Nautica watch!). It was also a very painfully fun birthday for me and shoutouts go to Mayuresh Varerkar and Jigar P Shah for the same (yes, my butts still pain). Overall, the starting of my birthday was a bigger bash than the rest of the day turned out to be, thanks to all those near and dear friends who cared to create just the perfect moment for me.
But apart from the fun and frolic and the watch-gazing I am doing (wink wink! 😀 ), there is a bit of sadness here. I miss my brother the most, his way of celebrating any event adds a whole new level of fun and awesomeness to it all. His way of saying that he’s always therefore me is by saying that there is no place in the world where he cannot reach me. I also miss my parents, who, while facing Delhi’s heat were still able to get through to me here in snowy Boulder. There’s something special in the way your family wishes you and I’ve had the pleasure to listen to them do exactly that. In all this while that I’ve been in Boulder since August 2010, today is the first time that I have missed home so deeply as to feel the miles of distance I am from it. Home, for me, of course, is where my family is, even if it is spread out over continents…
Birthday’s are a time for introspection (wow, I’m a year older! Wierd! ) and though some see birthdays as a day for sadness (anyone saw the Bollywood movie ‘Turning 30’ ??). But heck, I know that I’ve not even lived a third of my life. There’s a lot more coming my way and I’ll have fun all along!
So, it’s my first birthday Stateside and it’s been a fun day for me, from a yucky cake-cutting to an awesome dinner. Here’s to looking forwarding to a lot more fun in the coming year!

Funny is Life :)

For the past few days, my Google chat status is what the title of this post is – “Funny is Life :)”

The reason for such a twist in a normal statement – Life is funny lies in recent events when I realized that coincidences happen all around us and only in retrospect can we know about them. But what amazes me more than these events is that life is worth a lot more than just sitting and feeling sad. Life is about being happy.

And so, it is not enough to say that life is funny, we should all know that Funny is Life!

Tag this as #FunnyIsLife in your twitter/re-post this blog post on FB/email it to all your friends,
do whatever you want to, just remember that

Funny is Life 🙂

A month-old Adult

I complete, today, one full month in the US.

This day, one month ago, I got on a plane and left India. I have done that before, but this time it seems that the time gap when I will be getting back will be a lot longer. There’s no sense of regret and sadness for me today. It is not that I am indifferent. It’s just that I know that here, I am building a future of which I will be sure and in control of.

So, here I am, a one month-old adult in the US, working for myself and I present a few lines from a paper I am writing about Leadership qualities to be submitted tomorrow…

No one is born a Leader. This is the premise in which I have believed all my life. We all have certain qualities which if nurtured properly, can make each individual a Leader but no one can stand up on their own and become a Leader.

Some random thought – Whenever I sit in a park or anywhere close to nature, I immediately start examining the stones around me. It’s a habit I have kept from childhood and as a result I have collected stones from the deserts of Rajasthan to the shores of South Africa, from the beaches of Mangalore to one which came out of my Father, taken out by a mystical healer woman somewhere in the Himalayas. Today, as I sat waiting for a bus, I once again started looking at the stones around me. However, today I did not collect any stones. I realized today that they are always the same type of stones. All my life, from all the various places that I have collected stones in torn and over-loaded jeans pockets, I have always seen the same stones. I am not a gemologist, but today I am bored from those valueless stones. I want new stones. Or perhaps that’s what is wrong with my outlook. I will probably not collect stones from now on. I will no longer look down at the earth to pass time. I want to look up, I want to grow. I want to collect the clouds now.

BHAAAAG!

What’s the most fun thing you remember about being in College?
What’s the most fun thing you remember about being a hostler?
What’s the most fun thing you remember about being out late at night with your friends?

Here’s the most fun thing which has happened to me till now in the US –
p.s. It’s a silly thing. Enjoy!

Today, I, along with Shyam and Abhjit, who are my roomies, went to drop off a friend at the bus stand to catch a bus to Longmont. It was a long wait as we arrived at the stand at 9:30 PM while the earliest bus would not be there before 10:10 PM. So, we went in to the closest Burger King and ordered a BK Veggie burger. This time, I confirmed with the staff that the order did not contain any beef/eggs/ham/chicken/meat/fish or any other non-vegetarian food. The lady at the counter looked at me like I was from outer-space but I was more concerned in not repeating an incident as had happened with us at a McDonald’s recently. Good thing that history did not repeat itself.

Then, we waited outside for the bus to arrive, all the while joking and having good fun. Shyam was still feeling hungry and as I write this, he’s put a cooker of rice on the stove. After our friend got on the bus and we all bid good byes, we three musketeers walked off towards our home. It’s been a long first day of studies and we were totally exhausted. In no mood to face the long walk back home, we were looking for a bus which would take us home.

Shyam spotted it first. A beautiful, gleaming, fast bus called the Bound heading in the direction we wanted to go but across the road on the other side. Abhijit spotted it next and by the time I spotted it, they both were sprinting towards the bus. I realized first that the bus had stopped at its stop and would soon be departing as there were not many passengers on that spot.

That is when I shouted,

BHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAG!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

All hell broke loose and we ran like crazy kids across the road to get to the bus. As we looked on, running with full lungs, the last of the passengers got on the bus and the bus driver closed the doors of the bus. We were still a good ten feet behind and hope was slipping away faster than the air from under our breath. Then I belched again,

ABEY BHAAAAAG!!!!! ROK USSSSSSSEEE!!!!!!!

Shyam put in all his strength and landed right in front of the passenger doors. The driver, a kind fellow who has encountered us mostly at such times on this same route opened the doors and let us in. We all took out our wallets to show him our BuffOne Cards but he had already some sense of who we were and had marked on his ticket device that three CU Students had just got on the bus. We thanked him and sat down, joking and thanking our stars for catching this bus.

We reached 30th & Colorado and got off, thanking the driver profusely for his services. All smiles, we got back home. Another day ends. 🙂

On A Question of Ethics

This happened a few days ago but I have been delaying writing on this topic primarily since I had requested my friend Shyam Chandrasekar to write on it as a guest speaker on my blog. He has refused my offer and hence, I must write it myself. The reason why he should have written it is that the incident largely involved his resolve to do the right thing.

—

Few days back, upon a strong craving of ice cream, I and a group of friends had hit Boulder’s Pearl Street to find and plunder the tasty Glacier Ice cream company’s stall. We found a girl managing the stall and asked her for various flavors and made our order. She completed the delivery and whipped out her cellphone to tally the bill and tell us the whole amount but I insisted that she write it down on paper as one of us was going to pay and then everyone would give their share back to that person…

She agreed to the demand and looked around helplessly to find some paper to write on. I took a pen out of my pocket and gave her some tissue paper from her own stall to write down the bill on. She quickly summarized a bill of about $19.40 and I took the money from our today’s bakra(We still need to give our share of the money back to this person!!!) and handed a $20 bill to the girl. She casually commented that it was so late and she was so tired after having studied at the University that her mind was just not working. Having said this, she gave me the change and thus ended our transaction.

As we walked off, my friends enjoyed a nice, cold, tasty ice cream treat at the expense of our bakra while I wondered as to who it really was at whose expense we were really enjoying! You see, there were a total of 6 people in my group and most of us had opted for a single scoop of ice cream with a waffle cone which is slightly costlier than usual. So a total of under $20 was just quite not right. As I pondered over this, my friends chided me for going into deep thought again, as is my habit and asked me to join them in the conversation. I did that, but before doing so, I called Shyam to one side and told him about this dilemma which we now faced. I did not know the correct prices of a waffle cone but I knew that we had under-paid the woman by a huge amount. Shyam too expressed his suspicion of the same and having been more resourceful, quickly summarized the actual bill. We found that we had to pay this vendor a total of $28, that is, we had paid her $8 less!

Now it was time for either action or debate. While Shyam was more interested in the former, I chose the latter and brought the matter out to my friends. I told them that it was a matter of not paying what was due but also reminded them that it may be eight dollars for someone but it’s nearly Four hundred rupees for us! Most of them chimed in with the opinion that we should not pay the money back and someone even went on to say that we’re already paying through our nose just by being here for our studies so why not save some money while we can! While I was enjoying this debate and the reactions of my peers, we were joined by my friend and roommate, Abhjit Kaul, who had till now been talking to his family members on phone. When we told him about our situation, he instantly voted in favor of returning the money, pointing out the most important thing which tipped the scales of the discussion – that it may be eight dollars for us, but it’s an hour’s work for the girl!

That did it. Those reluctant were now quiet and Shyam quickly went back to present the money to the girl. He did not return for quite some time.

Oh, he did return eventually and told us triumphantly that the girl had been nice enough to give him a dollar off on the bill for his honesty!

Thus nearly ended a night when we had a taste of good ice cream and crowd mentality. We saw that Gelato is good and greed is bad. Finally, we saw that it’s not the amount of money which matters, it’s the amount of work which goes into making that money which counts and this reminds me, I better talk to our bakra and give back the money! 🙂

The Great American Cheeseburger.

So here I was, standing with some friends at a McDonald’s in Boulder, Colorado and we’re excited at knowing that there’s a whole menu for just about a dollar for us poor Indian students 🙂
We stalk the lady at the counter asking her about the various options we had and we settled on the Cheeseburger as it seemed the most vegetarian and superbly cheap! We then asked her about the ingredients of the cheeseburger to confirm our suspicion that we had found a veg burger in the heart of one of America’s greatest junk food joints! She told us that the Cheeseburger has cucumber, pickles, onion and cheese.
Cheese.
Cheese.
Our ears were ringing and our blood pressure shot through the roof thinking about cheese. We quickly ordered three cheeseburgers and a large coke(another dollar~fixed price for any size) and received our order, filled up our coke, picked up some ketchup and sat down.

The first thing I noticed when we sat down was that the cover of the burger said something odd. It said “100% Pure Beef”.

As I looked at the packed burger and then at the happy faces of my friends, I felt a bit of guilt but I pushed it away and waited with bated breath. They opened the packages and dug their first bites into the burger. They looked at me and I looked at them. I was perplexed at their reaction, either they were supposed to react crazily to the taste of beef or smile at me and tell me that it’s really tasty. But they looked perplexed and were probably wondering why I was not biting into my cheeseburger! I slowly asked them how the burger felt. They responded in the affirmative. I noticed that there was a tikki(cutlet) in the burger. From past experiences in South Africa, I knew that in meat-eating countries, a tikki in a burger is bad news for vegetarians.

So, I got up and went to the lady at the counter and asked her a simple question- Does this burger have beef in it?

She slowly, sweetly, responded- Yes.

Ugh.

I was holding cow’s meat in my hands. I went back to my friends who had dropped their delicious burgers due to my suspicions and told them that there was beef in the burger.

They looked at me wide-eyed. Religion was in question here! They had just bitten into beef! A few remarkable reactions later, we were still confused about what to do. Then, a kind lady sitting next to us asked us what our problem was and told us to be firm and ask for the Manager and ask for a replacement.

We went to the counter, asked for the Manager, explained what our religion states and got the burgers replaced.

My appetite was dead by now and I just ordered a coke(another dollar down the drain) and finished it in peace.

For this strange reason, it wasn’t a typical ending to a day. After all, we had just experienced what the Real American Cheeseburger is all about!