Ignorance and arrogance

We Parsis are noted for our love of controversy, next only to our love of good food. I’ve always resisted participating, but I must make an exception now.

It is all very well, and in character, to pour venom upon the heads of the two Parsi priests who performed their service to God by praying for the souls of those Zoroastrians who chose to be cremated instead of becoming victims (in the aptly named Towers of Silence) of the wholly inadequate solar system of disposal chosen by the Bombay Parsi Punchayet (BPP) in the absence of vultures.

Several experts in India and abroad have pointed out the utter impracticability of trying to breed vultures at Doongerwadi, but the BPP persists in its folly out of ignorance. In a speech given some time ago by no less a person than the chairman of the BPP, he denigrated one of these experts as being just an ordinary photographer. No doubt, the expert concerned does take photographs, but he is acknowledged as being one of India’s finest ornithologists. His name is Rishad Naoroji and his recently published book Birds of Prey of the Indian Subcontinent has been acknowledged as "representing a lifetime’s work, this book provides a huge step forward in the study of Southern Asian raptors” by no less an authority than the renowned ornithologist and ecologist Professor Ian Newton, Fellow of the Royal Society.

I write this in fear. When ignorance assumes arrogance, orthodoxy comes dangerously close to fanaticism.

B. K. KARANJIA

Poona