As I posted a few months ago, I am into weight training now. In this post, I wanted to document my experiences with different diets to support my goals.

Nutrition tracked using Cal AI.
Workout tracked using Hevy.

I had tried weight training before, without any focus on diet. Consequently, I never did see much gains, probably because of not meeting calorific and protein requirements. So this time, I decided to track my diet closely and do it right. Soon, I realised that lifting is the easiest part when trying to gain muscle mass.

Phase 1: Dirty Bulk (Months 1-4)

I used some online Calorie Calculators to estimate my calorie intake for lean muscle gain and most of them gave me around 3250 Kcal a day. However, the mistake I made was, I used AI calorie tracking apps like Cal AI to track my meals. Although such apps are excellent for identifying the food I am eating, they are extremely poor in estimating portion size.

Calories : 3150-3350 Kcal
Protein : 135g
Starting Composition: 68.5kg (14.6% body fat)
Ending Composition: 76.8kg (20.4% body fat)

No wonder, my weight quickly shot up. I gained almost 5kg in 5 weeks. Even when I realised I was probably eating way too much, it took me very long to slowly cut out all the extra food and by the 4 month mark, was almost 9kg heavier. I guess out of that, 2kg was water & glycogen retention, 2-3kg was lean muscle mass, and the remaining 5-6kg was body fat.

The first few weeks were hell, it seemed like I was eating all the time, force feeding myself. I lost all interest in food and eating became a chore. Still, I (erroneously) chose to believe in an app rather on what my body was trying to tell me.

My T-shirts started feeling tighter around the waist especially when sitting. Eventually, I realised I had been eating much more than I needed to and aborted this diet. I was extremely depressed and disappointed by what happened.

Luckily, at least my exercise volume went up steadily during this time.

Phase 2: Cut (Month 5)

I had 2 ways forward after realising my error:

1. Correct my diet and start a lean bulk going forward (Keeping existing fat)
2. Do a cut and lose some of the excess fat I gained (Losing some muscle mass in the process, too)

I chose Option 2, just because I felt so disgusted with my new paunch. I got rid of the shitty AI apps and started eating by feel, tracking only protein intake roughly in my head.

Calories : 2150-2350Kcal
Protein : 145g
Starting Composition: 76.8kg (20.4% body fat)
Ending Composition: 73.3kg (16% body fat)

It was such a relief to go back to eating normally and skipping breakfast again (what a chore it was). It took me 2 full weeks before I started seeing weight loss.

In the gym, I didn’t feel anything different for the first few weeks, in fact without the heavy breakfast, I felt much more energetic. However, my lifting volume stalled and even started going down a bit in the last week.

I also suffered a lower back injury on the leg press at this time, which made me re-think many of my exercises and completely stalled leg progress.

The last couple of weeks, I was hungry all the time, sometimes not able to sleep at night. I also started dreaming about food.

Phase 3: Lean bulk (Month 6 onwards)

Having realised what a mistake I had made, I decided to be more mindful of what I eat going forward, depending purely on eating by feel. Eating enough to not be hungry, but never force feeding. Hope my strength rises again, at the gym.

Let’s see how it works in a few months!

I detailed my struggles with UPI AutoPay mandates in this previous posts. The only way I could get UPI to work again was to move from Google Pay to BHIM, NPCI’s flagship app for UPI. Now, BHIM, being a government built app is supposed to be bad, but I found it quite nice. Soon, I waste find out why BHIM sucks balls.

Custom UPI ID doesn’t work

I was surprised to see that BHIM allows you to create custom UPI IDs.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t work. Payment requests to this UPI ID do arrive at the BHIM app, but promptly fail.

If anyone tries to send me money on this ID, it simply says the ID doesn’t exist.

Cannot Pay Bills

One of the main reasons I use UPI is to pay bills. Bu for some reason, only for me, bill payments don’t work.

When I try to pay bills, the account selection dropdown is empty and doesn’t show my accounts.

I contacted BHIM customer care via the in-app support option and all they do is send a generic email without reading about my issue and close the case. I tried this 8 different times, went through the same script each time.

Frustrated, I reached out to NPCI about the issue. No response.

Overall, the app is very clean and functional. Just that it doesn’t work.

Unified Payments Interface (UPI) is an Indian instant payment system and protocol developed by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) in 2016. The interface facilitates inter-bank peer-to-peer (P2P) and person-to-merchant (P2M) transactions. It is used on mobile devices to instantly transfer funds between two bank accounts using only a unique UPI ID. My complaint is about UPI AutoPay mandates, which seem to have a fundamental flaw.

UPI AutoPay mandates basically let you set up recurring transactions to merchants. This is extremely useful for subscriptions and I have been using this feature for years. I had more than 25 AutoPay mandates with 7-8 merchants set up on Google Pay, my preferred UPI app.

Google disables my account & kills Google Pay

It all started when I changed the email address of my Google Account and some algorithm in Google’s systems found this suspicious and disabled my account.

I was able to submit an appeal and get back access to my account, but for some reason, it erased all my Google pay data. When I try registering my accounts on Google Pay now, it says this.

Basically, it has detached itself from my old Google Pay data and won’t let me continue unless my existing AutoPay mandates from (what it thinks are another account) are cancelled.

Google Pay India customer support

I contacted Google Pay India’s customer support via chat, assuming I would be able to explain the problem easily and get it fixed. Wrong!

The Level 1 chat and phone technical support couldn’t even understand the problem. They kept asking me to “go into my other google account” and delete my autopay mandates. I kept crying that there is no other account, it was the same account with a different email address, but they refused to understand.

I found a contact for Level 2 support on their website and contacted them and this was their response.

Basically, Google Pay cannot cancel mandates which I had created via Google Pay.

I escalated to Google Pay’s Nodal officer, but he didn’t even bother responding to me.

Axis Bank Customer support

All my Google Pay mandates were linked to my Axis Bank account. Surely, Axis Bank can control who takes money from my account and stop it, right? Not so!

Calls to their regular customer care went in vain. Basically, they kept instructing me on how I can cancel Axis Bank UPI mandates done via the Axis Bank app. I kept crying the mandates were via a 3rd party UPI app, but they refused to understand.

Eventually, I reached out to the Axis Bank nodal officer, and they said this.

I really don’t understand how Axis Bank cannot stop someone from taking money from my own account. Never mind, I decided to do this via National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) .

National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI)

Luckily, NPCI provides a portal where you can login and do exactly what I was trying to do.

First of all, the website doesn’t work out of India without a VPN. So much for making UPI global, yes?

With a VPN, I was elated to see all my mandates with a “Cancel” button next to them. This should be easy now, yes? Not at all.

Clicking cancel fails spectacularly. It’s not even a one time error. I tried this over many weeks with the same results.

Why even advertise a feature which doesn’t work? Either ways, it at least confirmed to me that NPCI has control over my UPI AutoPay Mandates. So next, I reached out to their customer care via email.

One email, 2 email, 3 emails, no response. They ghosted me for weeks not even bothering to respond.

One thing is clear, UPI AutoPay mandates are not well thought out, there’s no clear accountability between the bank, the app and NPCI. Never using them again!

Below, I document a co-ordinated, well-thought out harassment campaign launched against me by my Bhikhari Mama (Beggar uncle). I have censured his kids’ phone numbers, but not his and his wife’s.

Bhikhari Mama’s Adolesence

To understand why Bhikhari mama is like this, you first need to get to know his personality and factors that shaped it. This Mama is my mother’s cousin (my mother’s father and the mama’s mother were siblings). We were very close when I was growing up, I used to spend at least a few weeks at his hovel in a small township near Asansol during my summer holidays (often with no electricity).

The worrying signs started when he graduated and “couldn’t” hold any job for any lengths of time. Eventually, we noticed that his mother had an iron grip on his career and would often tell him to leave jobs if they made him work “too much” or asked him to do “too much work”.

After a few years struggling like this, my father hired him as his personal assistant with his personal money and even bought him a computer. During that year, his job was to come to our place in Durgapur, play computer games, eat free food and then go home. Eventually we moved away and this arrangement could no longer continue, so my father got him a proper job in a company as a Data Entry Operator. I also grew up, and stopped visiting them every year, so we drifted apart.

Bhikhari Mama’s “Career”

Unbeknownst to me, Bhikhari mama was a pain in the workplace. He boasted to everyone that he had the blessings of my father (who was a big shot). He had unreasonable demands when it came to working hours and his work load and insulted people. His peers and bosses were probably intimidated by my father and didn’t tell him any of this.

The day my father retired, they kicked him to the curb. Over the next few years, my father and many of our relatives helped him get various jobs, but he couldn’t keep any of them. For one job interview, he spat on the interviewer and had his wife call him and curse him, too. Needless to say, he didn’t do any favours to my father’s reputation in the industry.

The Begging

Soon it became clear to him that he couldn’t earn any money, so he started begging. For the first few years, all the relatives, including my father and me gave him monetary support. But when it became clear that he had no interest in actually earning a living anymore, we all stopped. He kept begging from time to time, I sometimes gave him money, but not always.

During all this time, he never bothered to ask how any of us was doing. All messages were limited only to money.

Start of Harassment Campaign

He messaged me a few weeks ago, as usual asking for money.

Since he sounded extra desperate and I had some free cash, I paid him, messaged him and told him I will not be able to give any more and blocked him.

Not listening to my father and paying him was my biggest mistake and the start of the harassment campaign by the bhikhari mama.

WhatsApp

His harassment campaign started on WhatsApp.

First he messaged me from someone else’s number. When I blocked it, his wife messaged me. Rise and repeat with his son and daughter (Who frequently boats of thousands of social media followers, by the way).

Currently, my WhatsApp blocked list only has his family and friends.

Facebook

Having exhausted WhatsApp as an option, they all pivoted to Facebook.

Bhikhari Mama seems to make a new Facebook profile everyday, each with a different Hindu god’s photo.

Phone Calls

Having being blocked on social media, he pivoted to good old fashioned phone calls. I had to turn off my Indian number because he was calling so much and from so many different numbers. if I turned on my number, within 10 mins he would start calling from a new number.

What’s left?

For some reason, he transferred me ₹1. After a couple of weeks, he transferred me ₹1 again. I have still not been able to figure out what his endgame was, with this move.

Soon, he discovered that Google Pay can also be used for begging and started messaging me there. Luckily, Google Pay allows you to block people.

Turns out, even after you block someone from messaging you on Google Pay, they can still piggyback messages over transactions. So I had to block him wholesale.

What vile creature asks his children to beg someone for money? Last few days have been quiet, wonder how many more profile, phone numbers he will use.

Another year, another Amazing Thailand Marathon, 2025. This was my third time participating in this race.

Getting There

This time I did the right thing and took the 4:30 MRT to Sanam Chai station. There was not an inch of free space in the train. I reached there 45 mins before the gun time, but I underestimated how long it would actually take to get to the starting line. The crowd was unlike anything I had seen before; I still reached the starting line late and started right at the back.

At least there was a very nice drone show to look at on the way there.

The Race & Stats

I started at the very back and struggled throughout to get up front; eventually giving up. Because of the same reason, I did not run intervals, running at a more comfortable, steady pace.

Luckily, I still managed to comfortably below the 1 our mark, even though my right knee was seizing up.

The route was familiar, taking us past all the familiar landmarks of old Bangkok. Overall, I felt the run get over fairly quickly.

2025 Recap

Below, I did a comparison of my formal races in 2025.