Greetings on seeing Parsiana back in circulation. What a pleasant surprise the Readers’ Forum column (Parsiana, July 21-August 6, 2020) harbored for this subscriber. In addition to my own, "Life lessons,” there were three other engrossing and informative letters. Two were written by old time Delhites, Nawshir Khurody and Yezad Kapadia, while the third was from a California-based friend, Dr Ardeshir Damania.
Khurody and I were Delhites from the 1930s and 40s. He does not remember when we met; maybe he was too young then. His mother, Persis Kothawala, and mine, Kumi Irani (Sorabji), were schoolmates 100 years ago. When my sister, Mani Sorabji Thakur of Gurgaon, and my mother visited the Kothawalas in Poona in the mid-1960s, Khurody’s uncle, Mr Kothawala, on seeing my mother announced: "Who can forget the champion horsewoman of Rajputana?” That brought tears to my mother’s eyes. My sister still remembers the incident.
Kapadia, another friend but of the 21st century, is a very humble person. He had a long tenure as president of the Delhi Parsi Anjuman.
Mention of architect Framroze Bejanji Sethna in Damania’s piece took me back to the early 1970s when I was with M/s Engineers India Limited (EIL), a reputed Government of India undertaking, which was then constructing three mega fertilizer plants at Bhatinda, Panipat and Mathura in collaboration with M/s Toyo Engineering Corporation of Japan and M/s M. W. Kellogg of the USA. Sethna was the one who planned and oversaw the strengthening and elongating of the wharfs/jetty at Kandla port. This was the first time that a port in India was able to berth ships of such size or single pieces of such massive dimensions and weight. I was senior material control officer at EIL then and had interacted with Sethna.
RUSI SORABJI
Los Angeles, California, USA
rustam@sorabji.org
I enjoyed reading Rusi Sorabji’s letter "Life lessons” (Readers’ Forum, Parsiana, July 21-August 6, 2020) and have saved the following points to use as quotations:
"The busy man is never wise and the wise man is never busy.”
"Sometimes it is more important to discover what one cannot do, than what one can do.”
"There is so much to love and to admire in this life that it is an act of ingratitude not to be happy and content in this existence.” HOMI R. MULLAN
mullan.hts@gmail.com