Kasbah gyms in UP are the new quest for a better life

‘Push Harder than Yesterday if You Want a Different Tomorrow’ – a mantra for body and mind, is practiced with austerity in rural Bundelkhand

WrittenBy:Khabar Lahariya
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Two years ago, or maybe longer, on an early spring morning in Karwi town in Uttar Pradesh, on a newspaper delivery round, we encountered a strange sight. A long queue of people from all walks of Chitrakoot life–skinny kids, their muscular mothers, moustachioed fathers–all armed with a smudged receipt, and disappearing into a murky basement. We peered inside, where we could only see scores of hands waving in the air. We smelt a story, the scent of which became headier by the rumour , apparently, this was a medico-exercise cult that involved a communal invocation (to whom was unclear) and cured leg pains of all kinds. 

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We were pretty put out when the cult left town. Forget just missing the smoke of Mayawati’s helicopter – this was a story that we shouldn’t have allowed to get away.

Luckily for us, barely a year later, Karwi town got its first gym, Flex Gym Fitness. We were back in business. Or rather, bodies were in business for what we thought was subsistence-deprived Bundelkhand. Drought we may have, but we have dreams too; we see the world and its obsessions, and partaking of those is a right as valid as any other. Aspired to by all the young and restless, and accessed by few.  

We passed Flex on Karwi’s main street, feigning indifference a few times, yet each time noting its red and blue walls and its emptiness. ‘It’s too expensive’, said the moles we sent in to recce the place. It smelt like another city, another life. 

Not to be deterred, we decided to meet the owners, Saurabh Dube and Shivam Dwivedi – noting with interest, both at the time, and in subsequent gym-hops, how curious it was that the savarnas of Bundelkhand have moved from less scholarly professions into those of the body. As college students (MBA and BTech), both had worked out in another gym in Sitapur, 10 kilometres away, and the craze, and its potential for business, had taken hold. Conveniently, both had fathers either in banking-cum-government, or pradhan-cum-contractor positions, so monetary backing for their business wasn’t hard to come by. They started Flex in partnership in early 2016. The place was like a ride in an amusement park: the jerks and scares provided in no small part by the shock of the yellows and blues and reds, than the rippled role model/super villain wallpaper (designed to motivate, no doubt). It was uncannily like an interview with a comedy duo we knew from Faizabad, although funnier. The fleshy Dwivedi was the spokesperson and PR, explaining how they wanted to provide the facilities they themselves had wanted, and which were only available 10 kilometres away. Yes, it was expensive and yes it was empty at the moment, but people take time to adjust to new things.

But Flex Gym was the start of something intriguing. What was it? ‘Push Harder than Yesterday if You Want a Different Tomorrow’ urged the wall paper, and the soft-spoken-yet-large-chested trainer, Manzar Ahmad Khan, a Fine Arts student as well as the First Prize winner at the most recent Mr He Man Body Building Championship – was an embodiment of this nebulous aspiration. And then there was Nidhi Goyal, a confident middle-class woman with perspicacity about her impending weak knees and no qualms at being the sole focus of Khan’s gentle attentions, at women’s hour at Flex. ‘I like the environment here, it’s very peaceful.’ Something was churning at the heart of Bundelkhand, and it went deeper than rippling muscle.

Where was it stemming from, this hopefulness located in the transformation of body? The democratisation of access to media may be one source, that aspirations of what you want to look like are available to all: anyone can be a Kareena or a Siddharth Malhotra on Facebook or Whatsapp. And so what if all the cinemas shut down in your town, if you like ‘Chikni Chameli’ or ‘DJ Wale Babu’, you can YouTube it to death, until you know the lines and the colours and the six-packs as well as you know your own body. “People didn’t think about themselves before, and now they do,” is what a wise consumer of social media we know in Karwi told us was at the heart of the change in ‘fashion’ and focus on how to ‘maintain’ yourself. Body banao, toh life ban jaati hai (if you have a fit body, your life is set)A control over what you look like can be the secret to controlling your identity, your destiny. It’s an austere regimen and it demands faith. As Dipendra Singh aka Dipu Bundela, who has a stake in the business along with Dube and Dwivedi and is expanding the business, chipped in, “Look at John Abraham, for instance. He might finish his shoot at 2 or 3 am, but he’ll still exercise.” Kalupur is where Flex is headed to, next, he tells us. And adds, all nonchalant, ‘Nobody wants to look ugly. You can’t be looking ugly and fat these days.’  

Earlier this month, The Hulk, a gym definitely named after its trainer of the sculpted body and the camouflage outfit (appropriate for the jungles and ocean both) opened in a Kasbah of Lalitpur district, Mehrauni. A block marked in our minds chiefly for its higher-than-normal population of corrupt ration distributors, and discrimination against Dalit cooks in schools. Here then, was a sniff of something different. Pritam, a young and skinny hopeful, told us that a good body could be the route to the most desired Government Job – in the army, or the police – and he was willing to put blood and sweat into it. The trainer, Rahul, who left us a little out of breath, had a different level of pragmatic wisdom and took to the familiar Bollywood-quoting, ‘In these modern times, girls want everything. That men’s bodies look like Hrithik, like Salman, like Shah Rukh. So everyone wants to be fit.’ Six hundred rupees is your ticket to all you ever wanted. 

Cut back to Whatsapp and the Art of the Perfect DP – that tells a little but not too much. In an age where romance is digitally constructed, and especially in the context of small towns and villages, where spaces to meet are few, this provides the opportunity for determining choice – ab log pasand dekhte hain (now people like what they see), is what our wise commentator says. And that means falling in love and staying in love is harder than it was, and you better haul your paunch to the gym every morning at 6.

But the opportunity to shape body and destiny isn’t for everyone, admits the owner of the Hulk, Munna Lal (gifted this gym, dowry style, by his brother-in-law, who lives and runs a successful gym in the adjoining district, Tikamgarh) ‘We don’t have any girls,’ this despite its branding as a gym and ‘Girls Fitness Centre’. ‘They aren’t being able to adjust to our timings. And we can’t have girls and boys doing it together.’ God forbid. Girls and boys on a mission to get fit and get what their heart desires, together!

For now, the small-town gym is a crucible of changing ambition, of bodyporting into a different life, not so different from the one you know, but charmed somehow.

Khabar Lahariya is a rural, video-first digital news organisation, with an all-women network of reporters in 8 districts of Uttar Pradesh.

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