There’s been some more funny goings-on lately at my newspaper, The Nation. The workmen have been busy refurbishing the entrance to the compound on the Bangna-Trat highway, and I reckon a lot of the motorists and bus passengers flying past must be wondering. At the moment it looks like a work-in-progress once again, as seen in the photo above, but for a while there we had a waterfall cascading down the area with the vacant vertical sections that the tourists are snapping. Now it’s gone. I didn’t get a picture of the waterfall in time, but it looked like this:

Well, maybe not quite, but something along those lines. Now I’m trying to figure out what happened. And what’s going to happen next.

At first all the banging and carrying about of bits and pieces just seemed like a cosmetic job, a bit of tarting up for the old nag ahead of her 36th birthday on July 1, but the situation’s become a little, uh, mystical. I’m keen to demystify it.

It all started a couple of months ago when a huge wall was erected aross the front of the property, complete with a fat concrete tower at the entranceway that I whimsically thought at first might be a tomb for the newspaper’s founder and now Nation Group chief editor Suthichai Yoon. He’s a great fella, our Suthichai, but he does have a bit of the ancient-Chinese-emperor look about him, and since they were building a Great Wall …

The wall itself, I figured, probably had at least a little to do with keeping angry mobs out. We had a wee scare last year with some fans of ousted prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, and there’s always the chance that the Muslim militants down South will come to Bangkok looking for Likely Targets.

The tower turned out to be just a better guardhouse for the security dudes, but then the wall sprang a leak, so to speak. While part of it was painted up in the same jazzy colours as the surrealistic Nation administration building, another section was festooned with the group’s new bubbly logo, and then a waterfall started tumbling down around it. It was quite lovely when it worked, though most of the time it had repairman clinging to it.

And then a reliable source told me that this whole shebang is about feng shui! That explained a lot — including why the bank in the neighbouring Nation Tower ordered its entire front staircase torn down at the same time and has had it replaced with a wider stairway. It explains the curious little decorations that have been installed here and there, and the mysterious columns in front of the bank that support nothing, and possibly even the big planters lining our driveway that are still waiting for plants.

Lots of corporations, in the West as well as the East, use the old feng shui water trick to secure their fortunes or, as in The Nation’s case, to try and revive their fortunes. My newspaper is fiscally ailing, so it may well have adopted a strategy used even by Michael Bloomberg, who pocketed billions in the news-media business “thanks to” his decision to install aquariums all over his workplace, and got elected mayor of New York City to boot.

As well as being the “shui” in feng shui (feng means “wind”), water symbolises money. The experts routinely advise businesses to put a fountain, waterfall or aquarium inside or outside their premises and keep that water flowing. If that’s not possible, they say, or if the noise might drive the staff nuts (even though the sound is part of the magic), just hang up a picture of the sea or a waterfall!

A nice painting would have been a lot cheaper that what was spent on Bangna-Trat. The price tag for all of these changes, plus security scanners at three entrances, was reputedly Bt10 million. That’s a lot of money, and the pragmatic and liberal Nation is the last entity I would have expected to see spending big baht on geomancy and the War on Terror.

And now a lot of it’s been wasted. The waterfall is gone, and there are two possible reasons why, both put forward by People Who Should Know: 1) A part came flying off some passing vehicle and smashed the glassy frontispiece; 2) The company’s feng shui advisers had a second thought, that maybe a waterfall was a bad idea, since the water was falling down, and it would be a much better idea to have a fountain, because then the water would go up.

This latter rationale makes sense — apart from the fact that the water in a fountain also eventually has to come down. (And meanwhile the rainy season had begun prematurely.)

I scanned a few geomancy websites to see if there was anything solid to back up the theory, but no, it really is all wind and water, either way impossible to nail down. Fountains are recommended for large locations, but manmade falls are fine too, both providing the “clear space” required by the Principle of the Four Symbolic Animals. They’re not for “curing” a bad location, but for producing beneficial yang energy.

Water devices should be out front, not behind, because they’re not solid enough to back up a building. That’s where you want a wall. Ideally they should be on the southeast corner of the front garden, or north as a second choice. On the other hand, says Geomancy.net, “It is acceptable even to place a fountain or waterfall at the south or ‘Fire’ direction to ‘cool’ the house.” Or you could put it in the northeast, the so-called Devil’s Gate, if there’s too much yin coming from there. Or just put it wherever the hell it looks nice.

If my boss does go with a fountain, I’m going to be watching carefully what shape it is, because this same website says it ought to be rounded, not rectangular. “Sharp corners send out sha or ‘poison arrow’ energy”. And they should illuminate the fountain with lights, too, because that somehow intensifies the energy flow.

“Moving water gets things going when the chi has been stagnant for a while,” says FastFengShui.com, which speedily adds that if the idea is to bolster your “career” (kan gua), make sure the water is flowing toward the front door. Once it had cascaded down, the water from The Nation’s waterfall was flowing sideways, perpendicular to the direction of the front door, so maybe that’s why I still haven’t had a raise.

Other hot tips:

* We’re going to need a turtle at the north end of the office. This is supposed to correct our “lack of advancement”. It’s not clear how we will keep the turtle from ambling southward if he so desires, however.
* To overcome our physical and intellectual listlessness, the coporate ennui, we need small fans on the corners of our desks blowing on plants to rustle the leaves.
* And wind chimes at the entrance to draw positive energy in, taking precautions to stop anyone from bringing them into the office and sucking all the energy back out again.

@ @ @

Just the other day it was reported that the 5,000-year-old shell of a “giant” oyster (20 centimetres long) had been found at a building site in Nakhon Pathom province, right next door to Bangkok, confirming that the whole region was once underwater. Somehow it makes the fuss over a fountain seem even sillier than The Nation has made it by itself by commenting in the past on how silly politicians are when they consult fortune tellers.

Asian politicians of the left, right and all four Symbolic Animals do this all the time, of course, most notoriously in Thailand when Premier Thaksin made a sudden dash to Burma in August last year, ostensibly to talk to the murderous thugs who run that country about sharing their oil and gas.

He was in fact there, it’s widely believed, to try and turn his luck around with a circumambulation of the Shwedagon Pagoda and a consult with the tiny but perfect astrologer E Thi, pictured here. “ET” told him to get out of Thailand between the eclipses of September 8 and 22 — he was in New York when the coup took place on the 19th. See a previous post on this here.

In fact, accompanying Thaksin on his Burma trip was Army Chief Sonthi Boonyaratglin, who, recognising a fine opportunity when one bit him on the bum, staged the coup. But not before also consulting the Burmese psychics, along with his co-conspirators. (These big shots have to go to Burma for their mystical advice, you see, because if they visited a Thai soothsayer everyone would know about it.)

Then there was the time in August 2005 when a pile of executives from Shin Corp, the mega-corporation founded by Thaksin, gathered to watch a live telecast of the launch of their new iPSTAR broadband satellite from British Guyana. First they were told to remove their neckties so that the launch wouldn’t be choked, i.e. jinxed. Then a problem was discovered at the launchpad and a call was made for anyone who might still be wearing his tie to get it off now. Minutes ticked by, and finally one exec remembered that he was wearing a bowtie. He removed it at precisely 3.20pm and boom, they had liftoff.

The news is not always good or funny: Last month a 51-year-old woman was trodden to death in a crowd’s rush to get a holy amulet. She was among the thousands gathered at a temple in in Nakhon Si Thammarat where coupons were to be distributed, each one good for a Jatukham Rammathep amulet.

In the endless parade of Buddhist icons coined by entrepreneurs and “blessed” by high-ranking monks in exchange for cash donations, this is currently the hottest property. Most of the people in the frenzied crowd were themselves entrepreneurs keen to buy a bunch and then resell them at a profit.

In March last year Chidchai Wannasathid, a police general and acting deputy prime minister, confidently declared that the Muslim uprising in southern Thailand would soon calm down because of what had happened to the 50-year-old Brahma statue at Bangkok’s famous Erawan Shrine.

Chidchai reckoned the statue’s destruction by a reportedly unhinged man wielding a metal pipe represented the four-faced god Thao Maha Phrom’s “self-sacrifice”, a Jesus-style carrying-off of the bad luck troubling the country. An astrologer had told him so, he said, and the situation in the South “should now start to improve”. (Two previous Dorseyland posts on the shrine’s demolition here and here.

While the top cop was spinning the news, Thaksin was kowtowing to the shrine and ritually releasing nine birds from their cages, and one of his chief critics, Sondhi Limthongkul of the People’s Alliance for Democracy, was speculating loudly that “someone who is deeply obsessed with superstition wanted to destroy Thao Maha Phrom so that he can rebuild it by himself and then bury ‘his stuff’ in the statue to avert ill omens”.

“There is a rumour,” The Nation added, not quite helpfully, “that a high-ranking politician has linked his own luck with Phra Phrom at both Government House and the Erawan Shrine, so that when people worship the Brahma statues, they also pray for his long life and power.”

In any event, the Erawan statue was replaced, Thaksin was chucked out, and today the violence in the South is worse than ever.

Phra Phrom brings us back to Bangna-Trat Road, for it is indeed this quadra-ocularly observant Hindu deity who keeps eight eyes open on the newspaper’s behalf and has done so for two decades. Many staff members and plenty of passers-by make a point as they come and go of directing a wai to the shrine, our grandiose version of a spirit house.

Now the feng shui experts, I’m told, have pointed out that the shrine is too low, since the highway out front is virtually at poor Thao Maha Phrom’s eye level, and even the common strap-hangers on the city buses look down on him. So somehow he’s to be hoisted higher.

I believe in God and I recognise the psychological benefits in sacrifice. I just don’t understand throwing huge piles of cash into the mystic winds and waters, let alone risking life and limb for a clay or bronze tablet to hang around your neck in the hope that the spirit will be freed from its physical cage.