Sinha

New Delhi, Jan. 29: Vaastu Shastra, Feng Shui, numerology — nothing helped Shatrughan Sinha hang on to the coveted health minister’s post. Neither the careful positioning of the furniture in his office nor the installation of a statue spouting water could influence his malevolent stars. This evening, he was shunted out of the crucial health and welfare ministry and put in charge of the low-profile shipping ministry.

Feng Shui experts, however, have an explanation ready for the early downfall of the first-time Cabinet minister from the glitzy world of Bollywood. “You should never mix Vaastu with Feng Shui. You will never get the correct results,” said Shashi Kapoor, head of Heal the Universe, an organisation claiming expertise in Vaastu, Feng Shui and Reiki. It also runs a marriage bureau.

Sinha first dabbled in Vaastu and then turned to Feng Shui to shore up his swift-sliding credibility. He also tried out numerology. But rather than helping him, the messy mix of astrology and cult applications seems to have left him, stranded, in the middle of nowhere.

Kapoor attributes the “goof up” to “wrong application”. The first principle of Feng Shui, he said, is to find out the “lucky group” of the person practising it. “It could be either West or East group. And there is a complex formula for finding out the person’s lucky group,” said Kapoor. The prescription for a person from the West group would differ from one recommended for someone from the East group.

Did Sinha know his lucky group? Probably not. “If a person belonging to the West group follows the prescription applicable to a person from the East group, the result could be disastrous,” said Kapoor. For instance, if Sinha kept his water-spouting statue and the bamboo shoot in the wrong corners of his office, they would spell doom.

The success of Feng Shui, said Kapoor, also depends on the quality of the products prescribed. “If you pick up products from Sadar Bazaar, they are not going to help. The material has to be pure,” he stressed. Maybe Sinha’s aides picked up the wrong products that could not turn negative into positive energy.

Sinha could have landed up with a “fake” guru, but he was a diligent disciple. The former health minister shifted his office from the first to the third floor because three was his lucky number, changed the position of his chair from underneath a beam to avoid an accident and even installed his commode in a direction prescribed by Vaastu.

Last but not the least, he stuck an artistic “Feng Shui nameplate” on the door of his office to ward off negative energy from entering his room.