In December last year, Vinod Shirke, a Mumbai resident, won two flats valued at Rs 4.99 crores and Rs 5.80 crores each, in a lottery conducted by Maharashtra Housing and Area Development Authority (MHADA). The two flats were the costliest ever to be sold in the history of MHADA lottery. But Shirke has decided to surrender the costlier one citing ‘Vaastu’ issues.
Shirke, who is the shakha chief of Shiv Sena in Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) was advised by a Vaastu consultant to undergo mandatory alterations in the flat for a good career in politics as well as a better social life. Since he wasn’t able to do the ‘required’ changes, he decided to surrender the costlier flat. He, however, will make the alterations in the other flat worth Rs 4.99 crore, reports ANI.
Vaastu Shastra is the traditional Hindu architectural science based on ancient beliefs. But it has always been a subject of controversy, especially among the rationalists. It has been labelled as pseudoscience that promotes superstitious beliefs.
Source: WikiMedia Commons
Many politicians in India have often been accused of wasting taxpayers’ money in their bid to follow norms as per Vaastu Shastra.
In The Sokal Hoax: The Sham That Shook the Academy, a list of essays written by physicist Alan Sokal, it is mentioned that former Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N T Rama Rao demolished slums outside his office for better career prospects. The demolition was done as per the advice of a Vaastu consultant.
Between 2014-15, Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu spent Rs 26 crore on renovating his offices in Hyderabad. Two years later, a petition was filed against Telangana Chief Minister K Chandrasekhar Rao’s Rs 100-crore plan to build a new Vaastu-compliant secretariat after the demolition of the old secretariat. “Definitely this Secretariat has bad Vaastu. History is proof that no one has prospered because of this. Let Telangana not suffer,” Rao had said.
Meanwhile, in 2017, the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, one of the country’s premier technological institutions, announced its plan to introduce a course on Vaastu Shastra for undergraduate students pursuing architectural studies, reports The Times of India.
