“Spring-cleaning at…”

Jimmy Mistry, in the article "Spring-cleaning at the Punchayet” (Parsiana, December 21, 2008) states that he wishes to create a new logo for the Bombay Parsi Punchayet (BPP): "Change everything that needs to change, except the religion.”

I can only say that a religion that does not change with the times will die out.

Mistry is also against accepting Parsi women in India married outside the fold. He feels that they should not be allowed to enter our agiaries even if they or their children are practicing the Zoroastrian faith. He says that he will not sit next to a Mrs Rao or a Mrs Kulkarni in an agiary. This would soon lead, according to him, to a Miss Rao and a Master Rao, and a Miss and a Master Kulkarni entering the sacred portals, which would in time dilute the community. Does Mistry not realize that the community may get diluted and our ethnicity lost, but that the religion would survive?

It is really sad, if not tragic, that the religion which has been called the good religion, the religion of Zarathushtra, the first monotheistic religion which has influenced Judaism, Christianity and Islam should thus become extinct because of our shortsighted policies — policies which open all doors to get out of the fold, and keep shut all doors of entry to the religion.

Also Mistry admits that this prohibition of entry into agiaries can only apply in India and not internationally. Why the double standards? Is it because as a trustee of the BPP he can pompously issue these fatwas, while abroad he has no standing?

Incidentally, Mistry does not seem to know that Rao is a Parsi surname and that Parsi Raos are athornans. I am a Mrs Rao. I have the muktad ceremonies performed in my home, my husband is a trustee of various agiaries and atash behrams, and the men in the family are navars. So if Mistry is planning to place a priest as a sentinel in every place of worship in Bombay to ask the surname of every lady who enters, let me see if anybody will dare to throw me out.

The constant complaint of our community has been that the management of its affairs should be taken away from old and doddering people and the reins of trusteeship be given into the hands of dynamic and forward-looking youngsters. How unfortunate that the youngest of the trustees is as bigoted (for this is not orthodoxy but bigotry) as any of the old guard were, and we will continue to travel along the same self destructive path.

Will Durant in his monumental 12-volume History of the World has said that if there is to be a religion of the future it should be like Zoroastrianism which seeks the creator in the beauty and bounty of creation.

An English poet has written: "O World as God has made it,/ all is beauty;/ And knowing this is love, and love is duty.”

This is the basis of our religion. Surely such a religion is not meant for only an ethnic minority, but its message must spread all over the world?

BACHOO SAM RAO