< previous page page_7 next page >

Page 7
Times of India, the country's most important English daily, featured an advice column on vastu that addressed readers' queries from how to save a failing sugar mill to how to get rid of the guest that won't leave.
Vastu experts were so confident that, in many New Delhi neighborhoods, they would show up uninvited at someone's front door, and they were usually invited inside. One friend told me how two consultants arrived on the same day, fortunately not at the same time. I watched "Home Style," a popular television show that ran on the local New Delhi government channel, where a swami, with long flowing hair and beard, was now the vastu guru.
The Apollo Hospital Group, which is revolutionizing the standards of medical care in India with its chain of attractive private hospitals, incorporates vastu into the design. The Apollo in New Delhi started functioning in 1996; it broke even six months later. Some Apollo hospitals are now planned for Arab countries. Indeed, many vastu consultants now included Middle Eastern Arabs and Asians from the Far East among their clients.
An article in the Economic Times, the sister newspaper of the Times of India, reported that a finance company was offering forty-year-term home loans at competitive rates to individuals who constructed their residences according to vastu. The company was also offering a free vastu consulting service. According to the article, the company's managing director claimed that the application of vastu in the design of a house dramatically cut the risk of loan default since vastu creates an environment for financial success. The company also assumed that the forty-year term loans would be repaid quicklyin a fast seven to nine years. Many people said that they thought that all these vastu-designed homes would be a great improvement over the dreary government constructions that were built in New Delhi and other Indian cities after the country's independence in 1947.
Most New Delhi bookstores had a section dedicated to new books on vastu; but the majority of these publications focused on "instant" wealth, health, and fame. The power of fear had replaced the promise of greater spiritual well-being, and there was scant reference to science. But this boom in vastu books also extended to the availability of the English translations of some of the great Sanskrit texts on the Hindu science that had

 
< previous page page_7 next page >