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case against a distant wall far from the professor's desk. There was nothing else in the room. |
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Professor Chhaya, who wore a traditional kurta (long flowing shirt) and pajama, looked up at the sound of my footsteps. He grinned and motioned me to sit in the chair in front of his desk. A practicing architect, he was studiously working on a project report that echoed the vastu belief of maintaining harmony with nature. He was designing dwellings that would satisfy the requirements of villagers in Rajasthan, a neighboring state southwest of New Delhi. |
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"The Rajasthan government has built many houses for villagers, but they won't move in. Won't even enter them. Why?" Professor Chhaya was clearly irritated, but he didn't expect me to answer. "Simply because a house should evolve Out of nature." The Rajasthan government fails to grasp this concepta problem that is endemic with all Indian state governments. |
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Professor Chhaya was a typical Indian intellectual, with an expressive face and graceful hands that enunciated his words. He loved to speak, and his elegance and intelligence made you listen. In my case, I also had no choice. He immediately announced that he would not answer ANY question about vastu until I understood some important aspects of Vedic philosophy, which gave rise to the science. More to the point, he told me to be quiet until he thought I was ready to learn about vastu. |
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After a few hours, he had scraped away the top layer of my ignorance. I felt launched into intellectually fertile terrain. Professor Chhaya sent me off with reading lists that included books involving the Vedas (spiritual texts that form the backbone of Hinduism) and some of his carefully saved lecture notes. He also sent me off to meet Sudesh Prabhakar, an architect and frequent guest lecturer at New Delhi's School of Planning and Architecture. |
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Sudesh worked in Saket, a community in New Delhi that I knew extremely well. I had lived in Saket for eight yearsjust one block away from Sudesh, as it turns out. Sudesh's office was on the second floor of a government-constructed building that had put a stranglehold on aesthetics and promoted mold and mildew over maintenance and, most likely, vastu. |
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When I met Sudesh, he was casually dressed in khakis and an open-collared Western-style shirt. He waved me into his cramped office. He was in |
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