Not just the Bombay Parsi Punchayet (BPP), which has initiated a mobed amelioration scheme, but the entire community should have woken up to the disaster looming on the Parsi horizon from the neglect of our mobeds. Many of them have to keep the wolf away from the door on a daily basis and face a nightmare after retirement.
Once the priests vanish, the bedrock of rituals, ceremonies and the religion itself will sink.
The BPP dwells not just on the paucity of priests for performing major ceremonies (pav mahal, vendidad, nirangdin and tano poorvani kriya for consecration of the dakhmas) but on the yawning intellectual gap between the clergy and the laity. The horrible economic condition of priests was highlighted by Jam-e-Jamshed Weekly (January 13, 2013) in interviews with four panthakies of Bombay.
It has become a chicken and egg syndrome where the least able (educationally) take to priesthood, whereas the best-abled opt for more lucrative fields. Naturally, the mobeds argue that
if their pecuniary interests are taken care of, a better caliber of boys will be drawn to the priesthood. To my knowledge, there are only three or four mobed scholars researching our scriptures!
To get out of this situation the very first step taken by the BPP is to ameliorate the financial lot of the long neglected priestly class. Setting aside Rs 2.5 crore per annum is no big deal and can be managed comfortably if the BPP were to give up its harebrained schemes such as the vulture project at Bombay’s Doongerwadi (Rs 25 crore capital expense and Rs 25 lakhs per annum as running costs) and the hounding of the two "renegade” priests over which it has already spent Rs 2.5 crore.
Indian Parsis have looked inward for far too long. They should take the lead from Iran’s female mobedyars and from the progressive Parsis of Pakistan. If beh-dins wish to become priests, let them. "Closed shops” are doomed to die, as we learnt when studying British industrial history. The same thing is happening to Indian Parsis, thanks largely to WAPIZ (World Alliance of Parsi Irani Zarthoshtis) protagonists and their blind followers.
The community needs to give solicitor Burjor Antia a standing ovation for his personal contribution of one crore rupees towards the BPP’s scheme for mobeds
B. T. DASTUR