Parsi Khabar

NEW DELHI: There are 734 Parsis in the NCR Delhi, Gurgaon and Noida. And about half of them turned up to celebrate Navroze, the Parsi New Year, at Delhi Parsi Anjuman on Thursday evening. One piece of statistics must be haunting them in the past 18 months, the community had one birth, 21 deaths and [...]

Anu Aga and Dr Hector Grant, among others, to support priests who were barred from praying at the Towers of Silence by the Bombay Parsi Panchayat after they conducted Navjots of children from mixed marriages By Manoj R Nair / Pune Mirror Fault lines in the 50,000-strong Parsi community were thrown into sharp focus once [...]

Residents want the toilet block – locked in a dispute since 1996 as Parsis fear it would contaminate water in their sacred well, located at Bhikha Behram – demolished By Manoj Nair / Mumbai Mirror With a section of the Cross Maidan showcasing a new, green look, Oval residents want the urinal near Bhikha Behram [...]

Concerned over the dwindling number of Parsis, one of the five notified national minorities, Government has launched a scheme to arrest the trend of decline in their population. The Central Sector Scheme is one of the four new projects to be implemented by the Ministry of Minority Affairs during the current financial year. The population [...]

For the last 50 years, at the least, a debate is raging within our Community, between The orthodox and the reformist lobbies, leading to nowhere. By B.T. DASTUR / The Bombay Samachar Zoroastrianism, Reforms & Referendum The bad blood between the two lobbies reached its peak at the time of the last BPP Elections in [...]

The Parsi bodies are piling up in India. Parsis are modern adherents of the ancient Zoroastrian faith that emerged in the 6th century B.C. in Persia, predating Christianity and Islam. According to many scholars, Zoroastrianism influenced these religions and Judaism with its fundamental concept of a dualistic world of light versus darkness, with a good [...]

Two high priests of Parsi community have filed an affidavit before Gujarat high court, stating that there is no tradition where a girl marrying in another community can enjoy Parsi rights. The affidavit has been filed in response to a writ petition filed by a woman from Valsad some time back. After taking the affidavit [...]

Yesterday we posted a letter from a reader regarding an incident at Doongerwadi involving two priests at a Geh Sarna ceremony. Here is a follow up post by good friend Ervad Marzban Hathiram. Besides being the Head Priest of the Behram Baug Agiary, he also edits Frashogard.com His response merits a full reading on his [...]

A follow up to this article is titled “Ervad Hathiram’s Editorial on the Doongerwadi Incident”   The below is a letter sent to Parsi Khabar by Minoo K Vaghchhipawalla Minoo writes… Unethical and unprofessional conduct by the “Man of God” viz. the Priest Recently my brother Phiroz K Vaghchhipawalla, a resident of Godrej Baug passed [...]

Two children of a Parsi woman and her Catholic husband were initiated into the Zoroastrian community on Friday under police security as the Parsi community had objected to the Navjyot Ceremony. Police protection was provided after the couple, Roshni Mallu and Savio D’souza, approached Home Minister R.R. Patil through the organisation Association for Revival of [...]

Why Sauce For the Parsi Goose Is Not Sauce For the Parsi Gander? By Noshir H. Dadrawala Parsis have been in the National news again and as usual for all the wrong reasons. The current dispute is essentially gender based: Why can only Parsi men marry outside the community and continue to enjoy full religious [...]

Bombay Parsi Panchayet declares that funerals of woman married outside community will not be allowed at towers. After refusing permission to an inter-caste married Parsi woman to let her body be consigned to the Towers of Silence after her death because she had assumed a ‘Hindu’ name, the Bombay Parsi Panchayet (BPP) has declared that [...]

A Parsi woman married to a non-Parsi has sought the Gujarat High Court’s intervention to avail the fundamental right to worship and to access the religious places of Parsis she was denied by her community after her marriage. The Public Interest Litigation (PIL), perhaps the first of its kind, was admitted in Ahmedabad Thursday. The [...]

Adil Fatakia literally lives in the past; the 65-year-old bachelor takes great pride and interest in the rich legacy of his community. In fact, he can trace his family tree 13 centuries back to when the first Parsis landed in Sanjan near Nargol – fleeing religious persecution in Persia, now Iran. By Tejas Patel, NDTV, [...]

An enterprising 55-year-old bachelor claiming to have almost made it to the portals of the Forbes list of billionaires was reluctantly but firmly refused entry to an exclusive party last Saturday. So were pushy parents and wannabe in-laws eager to gatecrash the meet. By Mahafreed Irani for TNN The unlikely bouncers were hoary-headed and fragile [...]