Readers' Forum
“Maag, Maag and Company”
However abhorrent it might seem to Parsiana readers and others, the soliciting of alms at Bombay’s Doongerwadi should not occasion surprise ("Maag, Maag and Company,” Events and Personalities, Parsiana, May 21, 2012).
Grandly termed "pallbearers,” these khandhias and nasa-salars have no recourse other than begging to sustain them through the appalling life to which we (yes, all of us!) have condemned them and their immediate families. Begging for them has become a situational necessity; however embarrassing to some, it is not a crime.
Just think: we, who forever promote ourselves as advanced, educated, enlightened and superior — with the built-in "Parsi, thy name is charity(!)” — have over three-and-a-half centuries ensured a noxious apartheid culture, one of dhongi (false) priests, ignorant laity and the lamentable underclass of morticians (to use a polite term). The comparison with the status of the Chandanwadi staff does not bear scrutiny: we have ensured the otherness of our dakhma workers by inflicting a vile ostracism upon them and their close kin. We may well strive to forget this apartheid of disallowing them from temples, jashans, gahanbars, navjotes and weddings by the pernicious use of this blanket ban. We further impose the repeated tedious cleansings they are forced to undergo (with rancid bulls’ urine, and naught else than water). Not content with that, they cannot receive education, and publicly at least, cannot hold any other occupation. Despite knowing all this, we begrudge them a pathetic emolument by way of "begging!” Why pass harsh judgments on those we have already penalized?
To be sure, it is a further distress to the mourners and the bereaved to be accosted by those who have done their grisly duties for the remains of their dear departed. In the situation obtaining at Doongerwadi, they have no other means of acquiring these extra pittances. Why then do the outcries in Parsiana not initiate a change in bakshish (tips) giving? Why can the Doongerwadi management, so adroit in policing outmarrieds, not supervise a collection point and then arrange proper disbursements, in full, to those downtrodden workers?
Under the Vandidadic regulations, qualified cleansers get fees commensurate with the status of the cleansed. What, today, is the going rate for nasa-salars? For khandhias? Has the enormity of their horrendous burden of disabilities sunk into our smugly complacent awareness? We have comforted ourselves with the "out of sight, out of mind” mode, contented with the sheer falsehood of "hygienic, sacred precincts” purified by our devout prayers (a sick dhongi joke, this!).
With the public disclosure of the disgusting conditions in and around the dakhmas, it becomes particularly noticed that the Vandidad’s clear warnings against the diseases and plagues arising within, and without, where decomposed bodies are surreptitiously buried, are ignored. Burial of corpses is a criminal act, and the nasa-salars are forced to be party to it! With crazed messiahs and their vociferous minions supervising dhongi priests, it becomes doubly hideous, since these very warnings from their much-vaunted "bible” about dakhmas being places of the greatest contagion, are wantonly dismissed.
Instead we encounter a traffic-lights assessment of the stages of a corpse’s decay: green for lilo-naso (recent corpses), amber for nose-busting stench, and red for the secretive burial of the maggot-infested last remnants! Since similar ghoulish assessments of decomposition of human remains are concocted by dhongi priests, let these hypocrites with their faked Vandidadic views themselves venture to hump the corpses into the dakhmas where they can see and smell earlier rotting remains. No doubt they will emerge with an "all’s well” lie, just as they do now.
On a related topic, can someone truthfully explain why ravan has been perversely applied to rotting corpses? It is a shockingly Ahrimanic distortion, a hideous travesty calculated to gratify those who proclaim that Ahriman is superior to Ahura Mazda, and those deniers of the collapsed dakhma system. For the enlightenment of those struck by this malicious disinformation, let it be loudly and widely proclaimed that the word ravan has never ever signified anything other than "soul,” the noblest constituent of an evolved human being.
The expression for "the late/recently deceased” is ravan shad — "joyous soul” and emphatically not "happy corpse!” What will these dragvants make of iristanam urvano? Do they explain the epithet anoshag-ruwan (anushirwan) attached to Khosro I and his illustrious high priest Weh-shahpuhr, "with immortal corpse?” Future generations will come to accept this perverted dhongi disinformation from these warped bigots — ignorant types breeding ignorance!
Ruwan and ravan are direct descendants of the Avestic urvan where it means nothing other than "soul.” On what and on whose authority have these shameless contortionists attached such perverse meaning to one of the noblest concepts of Mazdaic teaching? Surely these pseudo-orthodoxist anti-Zoroastrians must at some point of their religious (?) education have known that "corpse” is equated with "filth” — naso. Another, euphemistically employed, is ristag, which our expert Pahlavisants will have discovered in their quest for rist-akhez — "resurrection!”
Leave the lowly nasa-salar to solicit alms in the only way open to him — it can never compensate for lack of his just dues — more shame on us!
FARROKH VAJIFDAR
London
f.vajifdar@btinternet.com
Grandly termed "pallbearers,” these khandhias and nasa-salars have no recourse other than begging to sustain them through the appalling life to which we (yes, all of us!) have condemned them and their immediate families. Begging for them has become a situational necessity; however embarrassing to some, it is not a crime.
Just think: we, who forever promote ourselves as advanced, educated, enlightened and superior — with the built-in "Parsi, thy name is charity(!)” — have over three-and-a-half centuries ensured a noxious apartheid culture, one of dhongi (false) priests, ignorant laity and the lamentable underclass of morticians (to use a polite term). The comparison with the status of the Chandanwadi staff does not bear scrutiny: we have ensured the otherness of our dakhma workers by inflicting a vile ostracism upon them and their close kin. We may well strive to forget this apartheid of disallowing them from temples, jashans, gahanbars, navjotes and weddings by the pernicious use of this blanket ban. We further impose the repeated tedious cleansings they are forced to undergo (with rancid bulls’ urine, and naught else than water). Not content with that, they cannot receive education, and publicly at least, cannot hold any other occupation. Despite knowing all this, we begrudge them a pathetic emolument by way of "begging!” Why pass harsh judgments on those we have already penalized?
To be sure, it is a further distress to the mourners and the bereaved to be accosted by those who have done their grisly duties for the remains of their dear departed. In the situation obtaining at Doongerwadi, they have no other means of acquiring these extra pittances. Why then do the outcries in Parsiana not initiate a change in bakshish (tips) giving? Why can the Doongerwadi management, so adroit in policing outmarrieds, not supervise a collection point and then arrange proper disbursements, in full, to those downtrodden workers?
Under the Vandidadic regulations, qualified cleansers get fees commensurate with the status of the cleansed. What, today, is the going rate for nasa-salars? For khandhias? Has the enormity of their horrendous burden of disabilities sunk into our smugly complacent awareness? We have comforted ourselves with the "out of sight, out of mind” mode, contented with the sheer falsehood of "hygienic, sacred precincts” purified by our devout prayers (a sick dhongi joke, this!).
With the public disclosure of the disgusting conditions in and around the dakhmas, it becomes particularly noticed that the Vandidad’s clear warnings against the diseases and plagues arising within, and without, where decomposed bodies are surreptitiously buried, are ignored. Burial of corpses is a criminal act, and the nasa-salars are forced to be party to it! With crazed messiahs and their vociferous minions supervising dhongi priests, it becomes doubly hideous, since these very warnings from their much-vaunted "bible” about dakhmas being places of the greatest contagion, are wantonly dismissed.
Instead we encounter a traffic-lights assessment of the stages of a corpse’s decay: green for lilo-naso (recent corpses), amber for nose-busting stench, and red for the secretive burial of the maggot-infested last remnants! Since similar ghoulish assessments of decomposition of human remains are concocted by dhongi priests, let these hypocrites with their faked Vandidadic views themselves venture to hump the corpses into the dakhmas where they can see and smell earlier rotting remains. No doubt they will emerge with an "all’s well” lie, just as they do now.
On a related topic, can someone truthfully explain why ravan has been perversely applied to rotting corpses? It is a shockingly Ahrimanic distortion, a hideous travesty calculated to gratify those who proclaim that Ahriman is superior to Ahura Mazda, and those deniers of the collapsed dakhma system. For the enlightenment of those struck by this malicious disinformation, let it be loudly and widely proclaimed that the word ravan has never ever signified anything other than "soul,” the noblest constituent of an evolved human being.
The expression for "the late/recently deceased” is ravan shad — "joyous soul” and emphatically not "happy corpse!” What will these dragvants make of iristanam urvano? Do they explain the epithet anoshag-ruwan (anushirwan) attached to Khosro I and his illustrious high priest Weh-shahpuhr, "with immortal corpse?” Future generations will come to accept this perverted dhongi disinformation from these warped bigots — ignorant types breeding ignorance!
Ruwan and ravan are direct descendants of the Avestic urvan where it means nothing other than "soul.” On what and on whose authority have these shameless contortionists attached such perverse meaning to one of the noblest concepts of Mazdaic teaching? Surely these pseudo-orthodoxist anti-Zoroastrians must at some point of their religious (?) education have known that "corpse” is equated with "filth” — naso. Another, euphemistically employed, is ristag, which our expert Pahlavisants will have discovered in their quest for rist-akhez — "resurrection!”
Leave the lowly nasa-salar to solicit alms in the only way open to him — it can never compensate for lack of his just dues — more shame on us!
FARROKH VAJIFDAR
London
f.vajifdar@btinternet.com
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