Readers' Forum
For public well-being
No matter how deceptively tenuous the texture of our lives may be, we Zarathushtis have a sacred duty to safeguard and promote all aspects of community welfare.
For centuries we have been disposing of our dead in Towers of Silence located on lands gifted to us, in some instances by the then ruling authorities. As is universally known, the bodies are exposed to carrion-eating birds. With growing human populations, these places are no longer isolated. There is a decline in the number of flesh-eating birds. In hot sultry weather, dead bodies are left to decompose on their own generating bacteria, viruses and pathogens which are incubated and carried by air-borne insects, mosquitoes and birds. During the monsoons, with humidity at levels that would plaster a shirt to one’s back, it’s even worse. Clouds of mosquitoes descend on dairy, fruit, vegetable and meat products to spread disease. We must consider the health and safety of the pall-bearers. But who cares about them?
To start with, let’s have a medical team perform an autopsy, both on humans and wild life, clean out the entrails, hand over the body for preparation, paidast and then final interment. Since the advent of solar panels, there’s been limited success but there are more suitable ways in which one can dispose of the dead. Right after the funeral the body, wrapped in just a plain, white shroud may be carried by khandhias to a burial site, and lowered into a six foot grave; the grave may then be covered over with soil by nassessalars. No fancy, unaffordable caskets or head stones. If cremation is acceptable, then a crematorium should be constructed within municipal codes at Doongerwadi for the body to be taken to and let the remains/ashes be interred into the grounds there. Perhaps a two-inch name plate on a fruit tree planted in memory of the diseased would suffice.
And let the Towers be maintained for their anthropological interest. The ways are contentious. Two hundred or so years ago Doongerwadi may have been gifted to the community, it has belonged to us, the receiving beneficiaries and India’s occupancy laws will endorse that claim. Legal luminaries and the Parsi Punchayet trustees, working in tandem, can successfully present the community’s interests in the highest courts of the land.
The path will be strewn with barriers but we must establish a model of networking with municipal, medical, veterinary and public health sectors, to allow professionals to connect isolated cases, detect outbreaks, epidemics and deliberate medical attention. Public well-being must be a matter of our social conscience.
For centuries we have been disposing of our dead in Towers of Silence located on lands gifted to us, in some instances by the then ruling authorities. As is universally known, the bodies are exposed to carrion-eating birds. With growing human populations, these places are no longer isolated. There is a decline in the number of flesh-eating birds. In hot sultry weather, dead bodies are left to decompose on their own generating bacteria, viruses and pathogens which are incubated and carried by air-borne insects, mosquitoes and birds. During the monsoons, with humidity at levels that would plaster a shirt to one’s back, it’s even worse. Clouds of mosquitoes descend on dairy, fruit, vegetable and meat products to spread disease. We must consider the health and safety of the pall-bearers. But who cares about them?
To start with, let’s have a medical team perform an autopsy, both on humans and wild life, clean out the entrails, hand over the body for preparation, paidast and then final interment. Since the advent of solar panels, there’s been limited success but there are more suitable ways in which one can dispose of the dead. Right after the funeral the body, wrapped in just a plain, white shroud may be carried by khandhias to a burial site, and lowered into a six foot grave; the grave may then be covered over with soil by nassessalars. No fancy, unaffordable caskets or head stones. If cremation is acceptable, then a crematorium should be constructed within municipal codes at Doongerwadi for the body to be taken to and let the remains/ashes be interred into the grounds there. Perhaps a two-inch name plate on a fruit tree planted in memory of the diseased would suffice.
And let the Towers be maintained for their anthropological interest. The ways are contentious. Two hundred or so years ago Doongerwadi may have been gifted to the community, it has belonged to us, the receiving beneficiaries and India’s occupancy laws will endorse that claim. Legal luminaries and the Parsi Punchayet trustees, working in tandem, can successfully present the community’s interests in the highest courts of the land.
The path will be strewn with barriers but we must establish a model of networking with municipal, medical, veterinary and public health sectors, to allow professionals to connect isolated cases, detect outbreaks, epidemics and deliberate medical attention. Public well-being must be a matter of our social conscience.
PARVEZ DASTOOR
Farmington, Missouri, USA
Parsi2@sbcglobal.net
Farmington, Missouri, USA
Parsi2@sbcglobal.net
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