There are lot of beliefs coming on wearing Gemstones for a partiular rasi, based on date of birth etc, similarly there are beliefs on Vasthu. People believe more on these two to a great extent. Even some of them spend hue amount of money beyond their capacity to restructure their houses to correct vasthu defects. same way spend money on buying gemstones and wear it for good. How far these believes are true in real sense. Whether these are really having any effect or it is illusion. how to come to a conclusion on this.
Reg,
G.Kannan
Shri Kannan,
Between "vAstu" and 'gemstone' beliefs I think there is difference. Though basically both are beliefs, the vAstu is a more applicable one. But vAstu SAstra applies only for houses constructed according to the traditional stipulations prescribed by vAstu. For example, the land (plot) has to be square in shape; to some extent it could be off and become a rectangle. In the earlier days when the ancestral houses were designed and there was an odd shaped (such cases are rare) or rectangular (such cases were more prevalent), the area in which the ancestral house (by this I mean our ancestors built a large house keeping in view 2 or 3 generations living together under one roof) was maarked as a square and elevated by two or three feet from the rest of the property. The area of this square land has to have a fixed ratio to the building's ground area - I will not use any of the modern concepts like carpet area, plinth area, etc.
East-facing house was always preferred; north facing was not. Similarly south-facing was considered inauspicious. West-facing was second best. there were fixed rules for the location of the kitchen, well, pooja room or family temple (which some Namboodiri illams used to have), bed-rooms, etc. All these were for really large estates of a 10 or 15 acres of land! These rules came to be applied, mutatis mutandis, to smaller plots also. The result was very very uniform-looking houses, such as the Britishers still cherish to preserve by law. (It requires permission for even minor alterations of houses in UK. In Switzerland it is even tougher; if any neighbour within the prescribed radius objects to your paln for a new house or alteration on grounds of spoiling the view from his house, permission is denied!!)
The vAstu rules were given a go-by when "agrahaarams" were built. South and North-facing houses became common and the building, but the situation of a temple, usually at the west end of the street, was 'supposed' to ward off all the imperfections.
I had a superior officer, one Shri Reddy - a very rich man from the tobacco-growing area of AP - who was an expert in vAstu. He used to say that in single houses the principles of vAstu can be followed to some extent but in the case of very small plots of land it may not be possible and so there is no point in thinking about vAstu, vAstu dOsha etc. in the case of such small dwellings. same goes with flats.
But that officer used to say that many of our modern ideas about town planning can be traced to vAstu SAstra.
Today even deities are housed in cramped dwellings like our "store" houses! Hence, we may not be able to use or adopt the concepts of vAstu to our houses. But when building hostels, Senior Citizens' homes and the like we may be able to follow the vAstu norms regarding the location of kitchen, temple or prayer house, playgrounds, the hostel building, etc.
The gemstone belief is for those who can afford. In fact in Bengal there used to be a system of utilising the particular plant designated for each planet and make talismans so that the evil effects of the planets do not trouble the wearer. Whatever the method, ultimately it is a matter of faith where logic has little or no role.
