It was a poignant moment when Kayo Billimoria (pictured, Photo: Aavo Mari Saathe image library) sang Frank Sinatra’s I Did it my Way at a Navroz program at the National Centre for the Performing Arts. Nothing brought home the realization that the Parsi
community is close to its end as the lyrics of this sad song. A community that once sneered at the absence of a scientific temper in the religious practices of its sister communities, quoting for support some of the rituals prescribed in the Vendidad, now quotes (and misreads) that same collection of practices to justify its obscurantist dogma. Even several "luminaries” of the community have succumbed to the mumbo-jumbo, such as the recent ridiculous and unscientific proposition that an underground railway will disrupt the connection between our consecrated fires and Mother Earth. Our forefathers must be looking down in anguish.
Truly, our "end is near, we face the final curtain.” Sadly, we could have survived but stubbornly chose to end our existence even as the world watched in horror. We will be depriving future generations of the virtues that this community was once known for because: we believed that any dilution of our "race” would cause those virtues to be instantly lost; we believed that we were superior to our sister communities; we believed in sticking to a non-existent promise made to an imaginary king at some unknown date in the past. "Supercilious, racial fools” is the epithet that future generations will carve on our grave-stone.