Post by DEEPAK DEDHA on Jan 4, 2010 23:18:16 GMT 5.5
In this urban village on the Mehrauli-Gurgaon Road, the gym is the most popular hangout and almost every boy dreams of becoming Mr Delhi
At 14, when his father asked him what he wanted to do in life, Mastu Gujjar said he wanted to build his body, workout, pump up his biceps and compete for Mr Universe. That was it.
For the last 14 years, he has done just that like most of the young men in Ghitorni village, an urban village on the Mehrauli-Gurgaon Road where the bodybuilding is almost a sub-culture, where boys as young as 14 do some serious weight training.
“I saw a boy my age exercising and I wanted a body like his. I started working out. My body started pumping. People started noticing and now everyone knows me here,” he said. “They call me ‘bhai’. They all want to look like me.”
In this urban village of about 25,000 people, there are three gyms and two akharas. One gym—Star Gym—closed down recently.
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Mastu opened his own gym on the terrace of an old building, and a steep flight of broken stairs lead to a large room full of equipment. There are no treadmills here. Only weights.
In the evenings, around 50 men lift weights, their veins protruding, their muscles bulging. Through the corner of their eyes, they steal glances at the mirrors that line the room. Most of the men are preparing for Mr Delhi 2010 Body Building Competition. For years Mastu has been trying to win the Mr Delhi Bodybuilding title and he is confident he will be crowned this year.
In Ghitorni, and other urban villages like Aaya Nagar and Sultanpur, where farmers sold their lands to developers, there’s not much to do. With little or no education, most young men join neighbourhood gyms that are mostly owned by friends or acquaintances. Here, they train for hours, measuring the bulge of their biceps as they swell.
There’s yet another reason for their body building obsession. A few years ago, many young men started getting hooked to drugs and alcohol.
That’s when Mastu Gujjar stepped in. He started weaning away the young men from drugs, taking them to train with Subash Bhadana, general secretary of the Delhi Bodybuilder Association. He wanted to help, he says.
“We wanted them to leave drugs,” he says. “Around 70 per cent of the young boys here were into drugs. We don’t have work, we are not well educated either. So, they had nothing to do with their time.”
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Mastu claims he helped at least 40 young boys give up drugs by getting them into bodybuilding and fitness. Rakesh, a young man from neighbouring Aaya Nagar, is one of those. When he came to Mastu eight years ago, he was heavily into drugs. Mastu told him then that if he wanted a body like his, he had to quit, which he did once he got addicted to gruelling workout sessions. A couple of years ago, Mastu opened his own gym called the Mastu Club.
“This is to get them into something better. We have no jobs. We are starting to realise we need to get educated but it will take time,” says Mastu.
But one addiction appears to have given way to another. Now, peer pressure is dictating the village’s growing obsession with bodybuilding. In the basement of a three-storey house, Amit Lohia set up the Muscle Gym a year ago, charging like Mastu, only Rs. 200 or even less, every month. For them, this is community service
Amit started to go to akharas as soon as he was out of his teens. “My parents used to tell me to build my body so I could fight. Life in places like this is tough. There are too many fights,” he said. Now a personal trainer at Power House, a health club in Delhi, Amit, 27, says this is the best job for him.
Most young men in the village are employed at nightclubs as bouncers which they attribute to their “fierce” looks with bulging biceps that could impress anyone or ward off anyone.
Although, the gyms have come up recently, the community’s obsession with bodybuilding goes back a long way. Back then, there used to be akharas that trained men in wrestling. Those still exist but gyms have captured the imagination of the young who aspire to look like Bollywood stars with chiselled abs.
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Prashant Lohia, an 18-year-old student, spends hours at the Muscle Gym in the evenings. “For body improvement,” he said. “At school, they look at me and get jealous. Girls too.” At Aurobindo College, Amit even participated in a couple of modelling shows.
But it’s only men in the Gujjar community here that go to the gyms. Women don’t, says Amit. “They do the household work,” he says. “Gyms are not for them.”
Source:
www.indianexpress.com/news/The-musclemen-of-Ghitorni/562744