Making your home a fun place to live

Promoters of Vastu, the Indian ‘science of architecture’ that supposedly makes your abode a fun place to live in, are holding home owners’ hostage.

I came to know about it when I tried to sell a piece of land that I had purchased many years ago in Bengaluru.

Buying property in this city, that was to become the IT (Information Technology) hub, seemed like a good idea at that time. Every expatriate in Saudi Arabia I knew was buying land in this southern city and experts proclaimed that it was a good investment.

But nobody told me how things change fast in this sector. One moment I was the landlord of a property that was scorching ‘hot’ and then suddenly everything went cool and nobody was looking at real estate, but hiding their money in offshore banks.

Years went by and the experts said my property is in a “bubble’ but that I should not panic. Property and securities are long-term investments, they said. You should buy and hold, they said. When I could not stand the suspense anymore wondering what was coming up in the next cyclic cycle or whatever, I went to a website called MagicTiles or something like that and put up the land for sale.

After waiting for what seemed like years, there was finally an interested buyer. But what he asked me next, threw me. “Which side does it face?” he asked.

“Good question,” I said. “I will look it up and get back to you soonest. Don’t go away.” I prayed the plot was facing the kosher, the acceptable side. It was then I learned about Vastu, the Indian science of architecture.

Vastu is big business in India and is something like Feng Shui, the Chinese system of harmonising people with their environment. When I was jobless in Canada for a long time, someone suggested to my wife that we need to Feng Shui our flat to bring in the good vibes that would help me get employment. While I was emailing my umpteenth CV one day, my wife walked in with what looked like a golden dwarf. “This will bring us good fortune,” she said. When I looked closely, it was a frog holding a huge gold coin in its mouth.

“We are supposed to place it near the front door,” said my wife. When our kindly next door neighbour came to visit us, I think it was a major effort on her part not to burst out laughing. She talked about how her mother keeps Leprechauns, those magical Irish spirits, in her garden. Then my wife started moving the furniture around. “The couch should go over there and the TV here,” she directed me and our sons, and I wondered whether getting a job is so tough in other cultures.

Nature lover

Back in Bengaluru and as I was extolling the wonderful points about the plot to another prospective client, he said I need to cut down the tree at the entrance to the property. “It is not auspicious,” he said. Try cutting down a tree in Bengaluru and you will be suddenly surrounded by tree-huggers, activists and crazy environmentalists who will browbeat you and make you a nature lover.

The other day one government organisation was planning to cut down hundreds of trees to make way for an extension of the Metro and had to face the wrath of the residents. Maybe the activists have a point because Bengaluru was once a ‘garden city’ and today is more like a concrete jungle.

I am trying to let the ‘positive energy’ flow through our rented apartment by keeping the windows open, so that I would be able to sell the plot, but then huge, menacing mosquitoes get in and sting me and my cat.

Mahmood Saberi is a storyteller and blogger based in Bengaluru, India. You can follow him on Twitter @mahmood_ saberi.