During my days with a private equity fund, on a car ride, a senior colleague turned around to the Managing Partner and said, “You know, all our bad luck is because of Vaastu. I had told you long back that our office is not facing the right direction.”
My jaw dropped.
I understood his pain — we had recently lost a lot of money on some investments. But were we going to pin it on Vaastu?
We were entrusted with billion-plus dollars by our investors, presumably because when it came to finding good investments, we knew better. And we were talking Vaastu? Good Lord!
Now, admittedly, the office may not have been in the right place. After paying the highest rental in India, our office in Mumbai often received a waft of gutter from a nearby drain. But at best, it may have killed some olfactory neurons, not our thinking ability.
The problem was not Vaastu — it was our thinking.
We invested in industries we did not fully understand. We did not cut our losses fast enough. We trusted entrepreneurs whom even their parents would not — and we got defrauded.
Investing is hard. Even Warren Buffet makes mistakes but he accepts them — openly. He does not go around changing his office to make it Vaastu-compliant. I am not sure he has changed his office at all, in decades.
To err is human. To blame Vaastu is criminal.
Everybody commits blunders. Accept them and move on.
There is only one unforgivable mistake — denial. Everything else is a learning opportunity.
– Rajan
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