Nerve Endings Firing Away

You are well aware of my disdain for vaastu shastra and its spurious usage to justify superstitious beliefs. While in architecture school, I ‘studied’ vaastu for a while and found that it can be useful only in a limited scope and only when applied with full knowledge of the reasons for its use. But in application, vaastu practitioners prey upon the gullible public’s superstitious beliefs to impose their writ on designs of buildings, something they know nothing about.

The latest victim is the well-designed [by Charles Correa] Madhya Pradesh Vidhan Sabha. Although I don’t like the design too much primarily due to blatant use of symbolism [note the stupa roof] and typical Correa elements, it is at least different from the staid government buildings that were built post-Independence. The building now is in the center of a controversy as some MLAs are blaming vaastu of the building for killing their ilk. Yup! you cannot make this stuff up. I immediately thought of Gridiron when I read about a building killing off people. The only time a building kills its occupants is when the roofs falls on their head following an earthquake. But if you expect them to be laughed at, you are ignoring one of India’s primary pressure tactics – use of superstition and fear of death to pursue your cause. The government is actually giving their fears credence by thinking of corrective measures.

Their basis of fear – “sixteen legislators have died since Assembly sessions started being held in the building in August 1996.” So, sixteen people died in ten years. Big deal! The article clearly mentions that most of the deaths occured due to ill health and old age so I don’t understand how the poor building is to blame. They didn’t even die in the building. So by that logic, if the building was vaastu-equipped then everyone inside would be immortal. Heck, if I wanted to find a commonality among them, it could be anything from corruption to their beedi-smoking habit, which by the way are better things to take action against, if at all.

Help from Vedic Vaastu and Research Foundation at Indore was sought and expectedly, they said, “there existed many defects in the building leading to imbalance of energy and radiation of negativity” WTF! do ordinary people even understand or care what that means in layman terms? Probably not. Because it frankly means nothing. They might simply be scared because you tell them that if you don’t make changes, more will die regardless of the fact that they’ll keep dying even if changes are made. In fact, I have never seen a single report from so-called Vaastu professionals that has given a clean chit to any building. Why would they? It would deprive them of a paid assignment/consultancy.

Thankfully, some MLAs have expressed doubts about carrying out changes, which of course would be paid by the taxpayers money. For a change, a commie MLA had the only sane comment in the entire melee. Ramlakhan Sharma says, “Sarvadosh to party mein hai. They are making a fool of people. The Congress is no better, they join the bandwagon at times. What about the deaths of those who are not MLAs?” Yes, siree…what about those people?