Drift to other faiths

At the Eighth World Zoroastrian Congress held in London last year, the agenda focused on items such as history, rituals, religious education and abstract matters like vision for the third millennium, etc. Nowhere in the agenda were included burning items which are affecting the community today, such as, the insistence of our dead to be disposed of in dakhmas when there are no birds left on our Towers of Silence, the refusal to accept non-Parsis to see the face of the dead after the sachkar, our refusal to accept interfaith marriages, and subsequent reluctance to accept their children in our fold, and the most important, our rapidly depleting population.

The question I wish to pose is, how come, in spite of umpteen number of World Zoroastrian Congresses, North American Zoroastrian Congresses, Zoroastrian Youth Congresses, meetings of the all India Zoroastrian anjumans, and the existence of several Zoroastrian religious institutions like the K. R. Cama Oriental Institute, the Zoroastrian College, etc propagating the Zoroastrian faith, members of our community, in India at least, are still going in droves to visit the shrines of Sai Baba of Shirdi, Meher Baba of Nagar, Khwaja Pir of Ajmer, or Mount Mary’s Church at Bombay?

It is felt that partly the failing has been on the part of our parents who have little time to impart religion to their children as they don’t know it themselves; partly on the part of our elders who are not willing to accept central authority; but the main failing has been on the part of our priestly class. Unlike the Christian priests, or the Jewish rabbis, or the Buddhist monks, who have spent long years, not only in studying their religion, but also studying theology and philosophy, other than a few scholars, our priests in general, except being able to repeat our prayers by rote, are not learned enough, in the real sense of the word, and have failed to impart the true meaning of our religion to members of their congregation. In this respect our youth are thoroughly disillusioned by rituals like drinking and washing hands with the taro of a ‘sacred’ white bull in these days of antiseptics like Dettol and Listerine; to bringing a dog at our funeral ceremony to correctly diagnose whether a person is dead or not in these days of CT Scan and MRI, and at our funeral ceremony, no parjat ( non-Parsi) is allowed to see the face of his best friend, lest his evil eyes defile the surrounding aura.

The position is aggravated even more so by our fast dwindling population who prefer to find solace in other faiths. The pertinent question to be answered is, where have we gone wrong?

Brig N. B. GRANT

Poona