“A marriage of minds”

Your Editorial Viewpoint ("A marriage of minds,” Parsiana, February 21, 2011) was interesting. However, there is a slight statistical error in the whole discussion about "mixed marriages.”

For some reason Parsis seem to accept children born of a Parsi father as a Parsi, but not when the mother is a Parsi and the father is not. There is not a shred of evidence that the father’s genes are more important for the child, but as this folly was established years ago when men were "more important” than women, it has now become tradition. In fact there is no such thing as "Parsi genes,” given the inevitable intermarriage over the last 1,000 years, but Parsis love to believe in their superiority and I suppose this racial humbug is as good a reason as any.

If the community accepts the children of Parsi fathers as Parsis then mixed marriages do not matter one jot to the survival of the community; all that is required is for Parsi men to have a lot more children. If every Parsi man had children with non-Parsi women, the community would grow at exactly the same rate as those having children with Parsi women.

If one is concerned about the survival of the community and believes in a "Parsi gene,” then a better option would be to accept the children of both Parsi men and women as Parsis. The community would then flourish (numerically) even if not a single Parsi married another Parsi.

CYRUS KHARAS

Blaricum, The Netherlands

kharas@wxs.nl