About a Gym

                                                    Image courtesy of the internets

     To make one thing clear, I am not a 'gym person'. But I am in possession of a body, for better or for worse. I knew coming here that as I was going to be living and working in the same place--indeed, the same room, albeit spacious, breezy and lovely--that I was going to need to be able to take off and stretch ye olde legges. So I packed a pair of running shoes, some shorts, and a have-feet-will-travel attitude. As I may have mentioned in previous posts, pedestrian life here is unlike, say, County Highway LS in between Sheboygan and Manitowac, where the only thing to disturb your communion with the pristine macadam is a occasional pickup truck from which Lynyrd Skynyrd is being played at a very reasonable volume. Running in Bangalore, at least where I am, is not an option. And while it was nice for a day or two to savour the feeling of being a naïf, I knew that I'd have to explore some other option or return to New York a character out of Dickens.
     Times have changed in even the five years it's been since I've spent any significant amount of time out of the US; it is now possible to use Google to get reviews of anything, anywhere. Gyms in central Bangalore being no exception I discovered the following three options: 1) THE HOCKEY STADIUM! 2) Gold's Gym (seriously) and 3) Zela Luxury Fitness. According to the locals, the Hockey Stadium fitness center was "just not clean," "gross," and "fine if you're not too picky". To say that I'm not too picky would be to say... no one would say that. A personage no less August than J. S., internationally recognized sculptor and installation artist and erstwhile head of the Department of Sculpture at the Yale University School of Art called me "fussy". I was already in the acute stages of Dusty Shock, and I knew that even to attempt to enter the Hockey Stadium would be unwise. I had a similar feeling about the Gold's Gym, which I'd passed several times on my perambulations around the neighborhood, and in front of which were inevitably a claque of bros. (If you think that Indian guys aren't particularly 'bro-y' I suggest you check out the Gold's Gym in Bangalore, and stop being so G-- D--- ignorant.) Nevertheless, I sent both Gold's and Zela email requesting the cost of a one-month membership. The rates were jaw-droppingly high, Zela being almost twice what I pay for my local gym in New York (though not quite as much as what I paid for the fancy gym I belonged to years ago when I had a 'job'...) and Gold's was almost as much.
     I emailed both of them back and suggested that I pay a different, significantly lower amount. Zela agreed, so I made an appointment to visit. I was excited about the visit--I had actually sort of enjoyed going to the fancy gym I'd belonged to in New York, which was at least as fancy as the Gregory Gym Fitness Center at the University of Texas at Austin, which was so incredibly beautiful it ruined me for gyms forever, especially a certain gym in New Haven. All this being in the service, mind you, of getting myself to GO to the gym which I'm fairly sure isn't a problem just for me. And after 30 it becomes less and less optional, as I discovered this winter when I stopped going. So I'm on my way to Zela, proud of what a shrewd bargainer I was, etc. I arrive, and my first impression is that it's NQR. NQR, or 'not-quite-right', is an acronym used by T. K., our extremely well-connected friend, former classmate, and  co-hostess, and her other extremely well-connected, Western-educated friends to refer to things in India which don't quite fulfill equivalency requirements. [As a foreigner it's very easy for me to spot NQR--I've internalized R; I like to think of myself as something of an R canary. What is much more difficult for me to gauge is the emotional valance of NQR for locals. I won't dwell on this point, but I bring it up only to say that part of what makes places like Bangalore or Beijing so exciting is that a middle class is developing and inventing itself as it does so. If things in New York are seldom NQR, they're also often rather boring (witness the endless parade of old-timey bars unceasingly sprouting up all over Brooklyn like the borough that the future forgot...)] ANYHOW, Zela is a bit NQR.
     The reception area is two, low storeys high with a reception desk on the left perpendicular to the entrance, and three turnstiles straight ahead. I told the young man at the desk that I had an appointment with S. D., an explicitly Italian name, and he buzzed me in and told me to wait in one of the big cube leather chairs hunched below the stairs to the second floor.  S. appeared after a short delay, though not at all in an Italian manner. She was young, brusque, and wearing adult braces and had all my paperwork ready to go. I told her that I'd like to see the facilities before I filled anything out, so she took me around the place. The weights area looked fine (I don't exactly have high demands when it comes to the weight-lifting department) and the cardio area had a lot of machines, all of which looked like they were in very good condition. Then it was time to see the pool. We each went through our corresponding locker rooms. The men's was dingy dingy. But I would soldier on! We came out the back end and she led me down a pretty appalling back stairs to the pool area. The mold here is intense enough to be visible through the window from the street a level below. The pool itself was small, with what seemed like an awful lot of people in it. The area surrounding the pool was flooded, and a janitorial worker was pushing the water with a squeegee the size and shape of a mop towards a drain somewhere. We didn't linger in the pool area; I am not a swimmer, and Zela Luxury Fitness was decidedly not going to be the site of a watery transfiguration. Once back at the leather cubes I was a bit stymied. She asked me what I thought of the place and I wanted to say "I think it's kind of skanky and I wouldn't touch that pool with an MRSA-proof pole," but that would have made me a bad person, and they did offer a lot of classes. So I said that I was still going to Gold's Gym to check them out and that I would get back to her in a day or two. I wished I'd seen the place before I made my counter-offer.
     I returned back to the residency and spoke of my harrowing experience to T. K. She said that Zela was her gym, and that she liked it because it was like a 'clean oasis'. I suggested that there was a possible gender discrepancy in the condition of the changing rooms. She countered that perhaps I was being a bit to hard on the place. (I would like to point out, please note, that she does not use the pool.) I asked her about Gold's Gym, and she said simply "Gold's is much worse." So, two days later after I finally heard from Gold's that they would not lower their rate making Zela about $10 less expensive, I joined.
     After having worked out at Zela a few times I realize that a significant part of what I was reacting to (I stand by the mold opposition), was the use of materials and the way they were deployed. The floors, for example, are clean, but the laminate has separated from the substrate making raised blisters in patches. Some of the walls have been given an interior treatment inspired by the famous Herzog and de Meuron winery in which huge stones are encased in mesh and used to create an exterior structure. At Zela, however, some fencing is wired to horizontal metal strips with a bunch of little stones stuffed in behind it. There are chunky structures which divide the space and which are covered in fake wood paneling. One has the feeling that everything doesn't quite line up at right angles. And it's true: things don't. In large part because almost everything here is done by hand. It is astonishing and impressive what gets done here with much less than one would expect in the way of machinery. Cement is mixed by hand, tiles are printed by hand, stainless steel handrails are shaped by hand--but all of these are done with the intention of being as perfect as things which are made by machines. As someone who works directly with materials I find this amazing and impressive, even when the result is NQR. Now I feel like Zela is a good gym (pool notwithstanding). I just wish I wasn't paying so much. I guess I'll have to actually GO.