Arbit

This is just a short note. A small message.
I see a lot of people take pride in everything except themselves. People who take pride in Sachin Tendulkar, taking his century to be their own, taking a hit movie of some actor to be their own, taking some singer's success to be their own. People boast of the greatness of their country and proudly say that they are great because they're citizens of some great country. What I think is, people start doing this when the have no reason to think good of themselves. Sachin doesn't have to boast to his friends that he opens the innings with Sehwag. He has enough reason to believe that he deserves everything.
It will make a huge difference when people start taking pride in themselves rather than in their idols. When they think that their own work commands even the smallest respect rather than the whole country bowing to their idols. For instance, one guy might live his entire life saying he's a fan of Sachin Tendulkar and just paining some Dhoni fan or a Yuvi fan. These guys think a Yuvi fan is an inferior creature and just being a fan of Sachin makes a person great. But when this guy starts thinking that his batting or his bowling is what makes him superior to the other guy and not being a fan of Sachin, it'd be an entirely different thing.

Atheism

I'm an atheist, but I believe in God. You rarely hear that statement. Atheism is something that is very often misunderstood. These days you see a lot of people claiming they're atheists and they comment on theists being superstitious and all.

What the 'so-called' atheists say is, no one has ever proved the existence of God. They take superstitions, traditional faiths, mythical stories and folk tales as examples and say that people have been made to believe in things such as worship and spirituality and that logic and reasoning will say that most of that is not true. If we consider whatever is part of most religion, we can straight away say that a lot of it cannot be true. I'll take several cases and talk for and against religious ideals.

For instance, the sun is worshiped in a lot of religions. He's called the 'Sun God'. Now we "explain" that the sun is just a lot of hydrogen and helium, undergoing nuclear fusion and held together by gravitational forces. The notion of Sun being a God is out of question. But then, no scientist can ever say that life on earth is possible without sun. The sun powers the earth. Then it becomes our obvious duty to worship the Sun. Just like they say you must respect your parents, elders and teachers, you must worship the sun that made our life possible. In one way, worshiping the sun, or similarly worshiping the moon is justified, as long as it only means to have a little appreciation of their importance. But you often see things blown out of proportion- pujas and sacrifices and a lot of things being done to 'please' the sun. This is where religions go wrong. Then, we can also argue that that's not religion- it's just superstitions or a group of people faking religion to deceive others and get benefited. But forgetting these superstitions that are not really an integral part of a religion, most traditions are driven by good reason, like respecting the sun for powering the earth, the moon for giving light during the night, parents and teachers for looking after you and for making you what you are, friends for their company and all, nature for everything it presents. Most things seem justified. The idea of God, I presume, came up because people knew that something was very important and beyond their control but they could not explain why it happens. Now, we know how it rains and what causes rain, and we can even 'make it rain'. Yet people pray for rain because it's too important.

Second, the question of fate. Atheists firmly say that man controls his fate and there's no divine intervention and all, and theists firmly say that's not true. Consider this- Say there was a very small speck of dust that fell in Sachin Tendulkar's eye when he was a small kid and was playing a very important match. He might have got out that ball and he might have been disappointed and frustrated or whatever. There is every chance that his life could have completely changed if a series of such small events happened. I'm just making an extreme case. But things like this 'can' happen. Or consider a small piece of paper that's carried along with the wind and a guy finds that that paper is some love letter or something that someone he knew wrote to him or someone else and then a lot of things may happen after that small thing. What I'm trying to say here is, very small things can have a major influence in life. There are a lot of things beyond a man's control.

Then about our consciousness itself. Atheists say science explains everything and all (that's because they know nothing about science. I don't remember any great scientist who did not believe in God. There are just too many things science as we know now cannot explain). From what we know right now, the brain is a network of neurons. When there is a certain electrical signal at the end of a neuron, it responds in a certain way. The brain is just a very complicated network of these. Now, the response of a neuron depends only on its structure. How it should respond is already 'programmed' in it. For a given signal, at some certain conditions, its response would be unique, or that is what the whole of science says. Cause precedes effect. The brain is a huge network of these cells. Now, one can easily deduce that the response of the brain depends only on two things- on its state, and on the input signal or whatever you feel. Essentially, what we think as 'control' or 'consciousness' turns out to be just a function mapping our response to our current state and the input. The state of your mind changes when your brain responds to something. To me, it feels like I'm only a very sophisticated robot with an algorithm that decides how I should react to something and I have turned into what I am because of everything that happened to me till now. Ultimately, there's no control. I cannot put this thing clearly in here, but you should reflect on this- think about how your brain may react to something.

Then the pride 'atheists' take in talking about all the stuff science explains and all. That's all wrong. First, a lot of phenomena still remain unexplained, that is, they do not have governing equations. A lot of governing equations do not have general solutions (for instance, the Navier stokes equation). And even if we can write equations for everything and also find general solutions for each of those equations, the uncertainty principle straight away proves that infinite accuracy is not possible, that is, you can never supply perfect boundary conditions to the equations, and hence can never predict anything with infinite accuracy.

Now turning to religions. As I've already said, worshiping to 'please' god makes no sense, atleast when people worship the sun and the moon or the rain. Second, we can make a lot of arguments to say that most religions preach false stuff. Let's take Hinduism for example. In all our myths, there was only one country, India and everything that even the so-called gods knew was in India. How could the gods not know about the rest of the world? Even Christianity has this problem, how can the entire world be just Europe? Why would god not know about the rest of the world? And then, these religions say that the earth is the most important place in the universe and the Sun and the moon and the stars exist only to light the earth. Why would there be millions of huge stars so far away, some some thousand times bigger than the earth, to just give some little lighting to the earth?
And then there is this idea of heaven, hell and all... If the so called god knows everything and is everywhere, he obviously knows about what any guy is doing, and he is controlling that guy. If you are playing 'mario' game and say you don't play well, it's totally your mistake because you screwed up. You can't say it's mario's mistake for not playing properly. And if everything else in the game is also under your control, then there seems to be no obvious reason for anything to possibly go wrong. They say god tests you.. what's he testing if he knew everything already and is controlling you? And man is the best thing god ever created- and yet birds fly and man does not. Just a look at the multitude of life and you can draw conclusions. Physically, man is far inferior to a lot of other creatures. The best part of religions and of belief in god is, people tend to act 'morally' out of fear for god or hell or whatever. Then there are also rules that govern social behavior. There are a lot of positives that can be drawn from religious knowledge. But blindly following them is definitely not a good thing.

There are a lot of incompatibilities in religions and any atheist forum will point these out. But the fact remains that a lot of things are still not properly known. The most science has done till now is to relate things. The whole of science and math is based on certain axioms that you must accept if you are to proceed. You cannot question those axioms. There can only be a 'what has happened' question, but not the 'why has it happened that way' question at the fundamental level. If you can know 'what has happened' at the fundamental level, you can explain 'why has it happened' at higher levels. The idea of a God is merely our lack of knowledge and incompetence. And I would accept the idea of a supernatural force, one that made nature be the way it is, made the big bang happen if it ever did, and yet I would reject most things that religions say. I call myself an atheist because I do not approve any religion. But I must believe in God because a lot of things are yet unanswered. Noticed how I used 'God' in all paras except the previous and the one before where I used 'god'? It's because I don't believe in religious gods.

Any comments are welcome and I'd love to have a healthy debate on the topic.

Build up to the 'Best Physique' competition

Tomorrow, 5th February, Saturday, we have the "Best Physique" competition at IIT Madras. I competed in the competition in the last two years too, without winning it. Probably because I'm not bulky or because I still have a lot of fat on me. But this time, being the Powerlifting captain, I'm responsible for organizing the competition and this makes the competition a little more special. This time I put a little more fight for the competition that I did the last two years and I'll briefly tell what I think did right and what I did wrong.

The conventional training style for pro-bodybuilders has two phases- a bulking phase when they grow muscle and mass, and a cutting phase when they lose most of the fat( and a little muscle too). Typically these phases last for some months. I tried to follow the same, though in a different way- I scaled down the months into weeks. I had to do this because I had only a month before the competition. Till December 16 I was busy doing Olympic Weightlifting, and then a 2 weeks off from Weightlifting, and all the time I had left was January. So, any pro would just laugh it off if someone say's he's going on a 3-week bulking phase. Hopefully, no serious bodybuilders are reading this, so I'll just go on.

Bulking: From Jan 2nd to Jan 23rd.

The routine: 20-rep squat program.
The routine is kind of self explanatory, I do 20 reps of squat with a weight and each session I add 2.5kg. I started at 75kg for 20 reps on Jan 2nd. 2 weeks into the program, I started giving up on reps. I managed 20 reps of 82.5kg. Then I did 17 reps of 85kg, 14 reps of 87.5kg and 17 reps of 90kg, the last one on Jan 23rd. I did a total of 7 sessions in 22 days, so almost 1 session in 3 days (And I also did 6 sessions of Olympic Weightlifting in the 22 days). Other than the squat 'my' routine had 10 reps deadlift, weighted pushups, military press and barbell rows, all high reps.

The diet:
Probably the most I ever ate.Breakfast had 8-10 bread slices, 1 glass of tea and 1 glass of milk (I usually eat only 5 bread slices and drink 1 cup of tea). Lunch had 8-9 rotis, with curry , and 2 cups of curd (Usually, it's only 4-5 rotis and 2 cups of curd). Dinner remained almost the same- dosa or puri or whatever was available in mess. In the evening, I drank 2 glasses of milk (earlier only 1 glass of tea). After workout, a glass of fruit juice, and before sleeping, another half litre of milk. Other than this, I was eating some 3 eggs a day. And this was all the food I ate, no chips, no biscuits, no pizzas and stuff.

The result:
Probably the most important part is this. Apart from the strength gains, I gained a little more than 2.5kg. I started at 62.8kg and ended at 65.5kg. And the fat I gained wasn't all that much, atleast 20% of the weight I gained could have been muscle.


Cutting: Jan 26th to Feb 4th

The routine isn't any special. I got back to doing Olympic Weightlifting 3 days a week. The fourth day, I did some heavy squat for low reps, military press, etc... The last 4 days I have been pumping up- Doing a full body routine with 3 exercises for each muscle group except the biceps (I'm not allowed to grow my biceps coz it'll later pain in Weightlifting), 3 sets of each exercise to 10-12 reps. I usually am a big fan of jogging, but a minor ankle injury prevents me from doing it. I hate to do cardio on those cycling machines and stuff in the gym, so haven't been doing any cardio except for the high-rep workout.

The diet:
This is the major part of the cutting phase. I drastically cut down on food. 
For 3 days, I was at home (during Saarang). Those three days my diet was too awful- breakfast was 150g of boiled chicken, lunch was 3 omelets, 2 more in the evening, and another 150g of chicken in the night. Other than this, 1-2 laddoos a day (couldn't resist, was just craving for anything sweet I could find. This part screwed up my entire diet).
Then, after coming back to insti,
Breakfast: 4 slices of bread and 1 glass of tea
Lunch: 3-4 rotis with curry, 1-2 cups of curd
Evening: 1 glass tea. No fruit juice after workout. No milk after dinner.
Dinner: 1 plate of chilly chicken or chilly beef.
Before sleeping- 2 or 3 eggs.
I cut down on my diet, but the volume of my workout remained the same.

The result:
Cut down weight from 65.5kg to 63.5kg. Not sure about the strength losses, hopefully I haven't lost much.

Today and tomorrow:
Today, I started to dehydrate. Today, I had 2 glasses of tea in breakfast and in the evening, and 3 slices of bread in the morning and 2 rotis in lunch, and 4 egg whites in the evening. And till the evening, I drank not more than a 100ml of water. And I'm going to dehydrate a lot when I go to pump now. My dinner will stay as usual, 1 plate of chilly beef. Tomorrow morning, I'll probably go jogging. In the afternoon, I'll thulp at lunch, will load up on carbs. And just before competition, I'll eat a full pack of glucose. I won't be drinking more than may be 200 ml of water till tomorrow evening. Just for comparison, I usually drink 3-4 litres of water a day.

Just to mention, this time we have two body weight classes- under 65kg and above 65kg. The first guys in both classes compete for the 'Mr. IITM 2011' title. I am quite optimistic of putting first in the under weight category. And if I can get very lucky, maybe I'll win the title too....
The workout was pretty much fine, but the diet part was too painful. No rice, eating less than half of what I ate last month, no extra stuff like chocolates or chips or biscuits or anything else. Now pro-bodybuilders do this thing for months during their cutting their phase. And they almost totally stop drinking water for atleast 3-4 days before competition.

Bodybuilding isn't as easy as people think it is. It isn't just about going into the gym and lifting a couple of dumbbells. It's about control and character. People say those big guys like Arnold and Ronnie did drugs to build that body, but they forget about all the pain they go through when they workout and when they stop eating all the junk and eat very specific food.