The bodybuilders of Ghitorni

While I was covering the Bahujan Samaj Party during the 2009 general elections, I had gone to Ghitorni and was amused to see the number of small gyms scattered all over the place. I returned to the urban village to profile the gyms last week. An edited version of the story appeared in the Indian Express Real Page 3 on Januray 3, 2010.


Chinki Sinha

New Delhi, January 1, 2010

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 Mehrauli-Gurgaon Road where the bodybuilding is almost a subculture, which projects it as an ideal for young boys who start weight training from the age of fourteen.

“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.”

Here, in this urban village of around 25,000, there’s a little gym tucked away in the basements of houses or up on the terraces, anywhere. And men and boys indulge in never ending sessions of workouts.

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 the weights, their veins protruding, they muscles bulging and 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, a few have nothing else to do. For years Mastu has been trying to win the Mr. Delhi Bodybuilding title and he is sure in 2010, he will be crowned.

In Ghitorni, and other urban villages like Aaya Nagar and Sultanpur, where farmers sold their lands to developers, there’s a lull. With little or no education, most young men join neighborhood gyms that are mostly owned by friends or acquaintances that run a gym not to make money but as a passion. Here, they train for hours, measuring the bulge of their biceps as they swell.

There’s yet another reason for the body building obsession here. A few years ago, many young men started to abuse drugs and alcohol. They had the money and in the community that traditionally engaged in farming, after having sold off most of their farms, there was little else to do.

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 said.

“We wanted them to leave drugs,” he said. “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.”

Mastu claims he helped at least 40 young boys give up drugs by way of getting them into bodybuilding and fitness. Rakesh, a young man from Aaya Nagar, is one of those. When he came to Mastu eight years ago, he was heavily into drug abuse. 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 realize we need to get educated but it will take time,” Mastu said.

But then, in a place where all children start going to gyms for weight training at 14 years, one addiction has led to another. Now, peer pressure too dictates the village’s growing obsession with bodybuilding. Never ending workouts are a norm here.

In the basement of a three-storey house, Amit Lohia set up the Muscle Gym a year ago, again not for money but for his community, he said.

When he was just of his teens, he started to go to akharas to build his body. School, education, career became second fiddles.

“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.

A personal trainer at Power House, a health club in Delhi, Amit, 27, said this could have possible been the best career 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, depending on which way you looked at those pumped-up muscles, Lohia said.

Although, the gyms are a recent phenomenon, 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 whose chiselled abs are much in vogue now.

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.

The gyms only charge Rs. 200 or lesser per person per month. For Mastu and Amit, this is community service.

But it’s only men in the Gujjar community here that go to the gyms. Women don’t, Amit said.

“They do the household work,” he said. “Gyms are not for them.”

There are three gyms and two akharas in Ghittorni. One gym - Star Gym - closed down recently.

At Mastu's, however, a few women come to do weights in the evenings. They are not fromt he community but outsiders who are renting apartments here.

"For women, it is difficult to lift such heavy weights," Mastu said.

Mastu also wants to showcase his body at the upcoming Commonwealth Games. So far, all his efforts have not led him anywhere, he said.

"The government doesn't recognize bodybuilding as a national sport," he said. "There is no money to be made in this. But for me, this is all I have done. Hopefully, things will change. For sure, I am going to send my children to school not to the gyms because the future isn't here."