The hunt for an earth canvas


One of the objectives of pointReturn is to make the campus self-sufficient in water. By this, what is meant is that the campus will harvest rain water equal to or more than the amount of water used in farming. Ponds will be dug and rain water will be directed to these. A sloping ground becomes an asset when this is the design.

I must confess to a weakness for Vaastu, the Indian system of classifying auspicious order on earth. It is the Indian cousin[-some say, ‘father’] of Chinese Feng Shui. Beyond a point, Vaastu becomes a arcane maze peopled by hair-splitting experts. But I do take note of its basic prescriptions set out in a Vaastu-for-Dummies kind of booklet that I have. So I further specified, that any hill or hillock should be to the west of the property and that the land must slope from west to east or south to north and not the reverse.

Such then were the specifications of the land I was looking for. The hunt began in mid May, 2006 soon after my father died. The hunt was to involve many land brokers, promising leads, properties fallen in love with and lost, tense days strewn with phone calls, several hundred miles of drives in new and exploratory directions, searching for deals in a booming real estate market, learning what to look for, what papers to ask for, parsing local gossip, interacting with lawyers, government departments and so on.
Such were the stuff of sorties run constantly, in the direction of west and south of Chennai.

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