“Heroic, humorous...”

In their letter "Heroic, humorous, humane” (Readers’ Forum, Parsiana, June 21, 2014) Brig Behram and Zenobia Panthaki have revealed with candor that Field Marshal Sam Manekshaw "never wore his religion on his sleeve, never went inside an agiary and never wore a sudreh kusti, but he was a practising Zoroastrian because he lived by the values of the religion.”
Our dhongi (fake) orthodox co-religionists with their bombastic unconvincing attitude would disqualify the Field Marshal from being categorized as a true Zoroastrian even if he had worn the sudreh and kusti and gone to the agiary on the specious ground that "a true Zoroastrian is one who, in addition to the earlier mentioned requirements, also covers his head with a cap at all times.” And the Army cap would not have qualified as the correct form of headgear!
What is orthodoxy? Does it condone copious smoking? In "The adroit attorney” (In Memoriam, Parsiana, June 21, 2014), a tribute to solicitor Rusi Sethna, it is mentioned: "His desk was covered in a mound of papers so high that when you walked through his door you couldn’t see him or his chair on the other side. The only way his presence could be assumed was from the large cloud of smoke billowing out from his pipe.” How can one reconcile this with a later statement: "In his personal belief and in his personal actions he was a very orthodox and ultra conservative person”? It is also stated that "he always maintained and lived by the adage ‘to each his own.’”
Orthodoxy has a tendency to become flexible. In several instances is has been apparent that the strict practice of orthodoxy by staunch proponents has been forgotten by fanatic adherents as and when convenience, comfort or impossible circumstances deem necessary. Let us hope that the orthodox learn to relax their rigidity at the peril of being called dhongis once too often.
RASHID KHOSRAVI