“The unexamined life”

While life’s trudge may be eased by enlightened poseurs’ answers to nettling questions of faith, unreason’s darkness all too often leads Parsis through a trepid Tagorean topography where the clear stream of reason loses its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit’s ‘dakhmic’ pit.

As a people, our critical self-appraisal is way off. Insulated within the gated baug-havens and stony confines of our religio-cultural institutions, we seem outwardly safe from the impure influences of Bombay’s multitudes, religions, races. But, once in a while, a moment of clarity exposes our fire-tenders’ fakery, the deceit of our doyens of industry, and the pusillanimity of our punchayeti-plutocrats. That moment of clarity exposes their collective conceits, making them irrefutable, self-evident. Dhun Baria’s veritable habeas corpus (a picture is worth a thousand words – in her case, a video is worth a thousand cover-ups!) provides that moment of clarity. Why ‘moment’? Because, disposal of the dead issues are discomforting and, hence, best soon forgotten. The crisis passes and, before reflecting on it through the goodness of our thoughts, words and deeds – as we should – we get caught up in life’s swirl, forgetting Socrates’ secular admonishment: the unexamined life is not worth living.

Our adherence to the world’s oldest monotheistic religion grants us, ostensibly, an eternal free pass from challenging its precepts (God forbid!), its cosmogony, its too-simplistic good vs evil, black vs white underpinning, its very raison d’être: outright rejection of one’s faith is difficult for all except the agnostic or atheist. Such people do not have pie-in-the-sky after-life notions, and they care less what happens to them after death: properly, they’d have their organs harvested. Sure, disposal of the dead concerns — of dignity and environment — are indeed legitimate; and, sentimentality, however saccharine, does soothe. So, any civilized society must alleviate the pain of bereavement. But visions of piled-up skeletons do nothing towards that end; if at all, they only add to grief in the garb of the grotesque.

Why, then, this systemic failure? Anecdotally, this dereliction of duty has been ongoing. I was told that the bones are carried out of the dakhmas at night and buried nearby. While refusing to confirm my suspicion, a khandhia – fearing for his job — did not refute it either. But, would khandhias undertake such macabre, midnight missions, without receiving orders? (Burying of the dehydrated corpses is a routine function at Doongerwadi — editors.) Have we been boorishly blasé about the periodic ebb and flow of death’s dank secrets dwelling deep in the dakhmic wells and in our collective psyches? Predictably, the more orthodox and/or religious amongst us turn our backs to this problem which literally beseeches us from within Doongerwadi’s towering walls of silent shame.

Is it wrong to seek the righting of past errors? Should the desiring of transparency in a system gone too opaque be considered un-Parsi? Is the polity’s demand for answers from those punchayet-presiders who bristle at the very thought of accountability, unfair? No. But, will it happen anytime soon? No. The public will be placated by the posse of plutocrats running the show, or by the same oligarchs imperiously handling the reins of this society at closed-door meetings. Their sleep-walking through matters that matter is matched only by their maddening meddling in matters they ought not to meddle in. Alas, when the flames of outrage over the current crisis have lessened to embers of reflection and regret, they will again keep watch over the pathetic Parsi lot as it falls into yet another prayer-induced stupor orchestrated by the usual collusion of temple and punchayet.

People might counter this abject assessment, saying, "The reformists are doing something.” Yes, but not much. And, there may even be compromises: Doongerwadi might be better managed; the dead, decently disposed. Honest guardians may manage Parsi trusts and the Punchayet. Orthodox resistance towards intermarriages and/or the initiation rights of their children might soften, perhaps, in pockets of the casteist and sexist priesthood, though I doubt it. Solar panels may replace vultures. The nefarious nassessalar/khandhia system might be dismantled, and our untouchables may even be given back their dignity. (Again, I have my doubts. My moral code ranks the nassessalars higher than the highest priest, wealthier than the richest Parsi industrialist, nobler than all the punchayet officers and their toadie-wannabies, put together. These untouchables are more deserving of that non-existent heaven, paid-and-prayed for, year after useless year, than any who walk behind them in impeccably tailored daglis, hands handkerchief-linked.)

I doubt the Parsis’ willingness to question (though I want them to) their religion’s limiting paradigm, its bedrock premise – and promise – of God’s existence. I exhort Parsis to doubt, too, their purported purity. I urge the Parsis to doubt their notions of religio-racial superiority. If they don’t, they will have, as did those in Sartre’s famously existential play, No Exit; till we get over these nonsensical beliefs, our existence will remain, as he explained, ‘inauthentic.’ We will have to discard these feel-good notions of ourselves after dismantling the indefensible: the myths, the cosmogony, the thousands of years’ worth of Chinese-whisper distortions that make up our religion. Beliefs that cannot withstand honest intellectual scrutiny will have to die. We will have to divest ourselves of the mystic mumbo-jumbo of millennia past, our prayers, rituals, and Manichean (dualism: simply, black and white) underpinnings of the faith. If not, religion will hold sway over reason, orthodoxy will strangle progress, and ignorance will deliver wisdom, stillborn.

Goodness is not to be confused with godliness (both words are abstract nouns, hence, notoriously indefinable). Mull over this, before next regurgitating the tedious good thoughts, good words, good deeds dictum. We need neither obsessive-compulsively performed purification rituals nor mantras to placate the phantom phobias and needless anxieties created by our religion. It is time to discard these crutches manufactured by those in the belief business — sold and serviced by those in the fear business. Remember, the crutch of religious belief only impedes those who are not lame. We bear an obligation to ourselves and to our children to deconstruct, by Aristotle’s reductio ad absurdum (a process of approximating the correct answer by eliminating those which are incorrect), the illicit metaphysical tenets we’ve been seduced into cowering under for far too long.

In Thus Spake Zarathustra: A Book for None and All, Nietzsche pronounces the death of God and delineates the Übermensch’s (superman/superhuman) role in future’s godless world. In the context of the current crisis, Nietzsche’s words are preternaturally prescient: "When you look into the abyss, the abyss also looks into you.”

Consign, then, your dogmas forever to the silent towers’ abyss, grim company to provide the ossified heaps of our once-living dead. Thence out and away from despair’s dakhmic depths, fly to the future, fearless, on free thought and humanism’s wings. Therein lies our salvation, and therein our redemption, and therein any real hope.

Based in Las Vegas, USA, Zend Lakdavala is tutor of philosophy, English, logic, political science and math at the Community College of Southern Nevada.