My uncle, Rusi Nadirshah Dinshaw, was the last of a family of noted gentleman cricketers, and had the notable distinction of being the first non-Muslim and the only Parsi-Zoroastrian to be a member of the Pakistan test team.

Article by Farishta Murzban Dinshaw

The former captain of Pakistanis cricket team, Hanif Mohammad, who was also a member of the 1952-53 team to India, described him in Pakistan’s major daily newspaper, DAWN, as a “gentleman cricketer”. He said, “He was an elegant looking batsman and a very nice company…I remember that when we were introduced to the President of India, Dr Rajinder (sic) Parshad in the President’s House at Delhi, the President asked me, ‘Which one amongst you is the only Parsi cricketer in your team?’ And I immediately pointed towards Rusi.”

I do not have any childhood memories of Rusi kaka [paternal uncle] as he was diagnosed with schizophrenia before I was born. Although we lived together as an extended family, we stayed in segregated portions of the house. My Dad, his brother Murzban, was the only one of four brothers who got married so our family lived upstairs, while all three of my uncles shared the house downstairs. It was only as a teenager that we started coming into regular contact with him as he started to take his dinner upstairs. I don’t think he really knew who my sister, Diana, and I were as he would address us both as Arni, which was what my mother, Arnavaz, was called by family and close friends. He was diagnosed with schizophrenia around the same time as my father started courting my mother so I suppose in his mind all young women in the house were “Arni”.

As a teenager, I felt a deep sense of embarrassment when Rusi kaka was around.  I knew he was not well, of course, but I couldn’t understand why he couldn’t be clean like everyone else. There would be battles in the house as Sanaullah, his caregiver, and my Dad would attempt to get him to bathe and change his clothes.  It was many years later, after I started researching schizophrenia,  that I understood that lack of personal hygiene is one of the most obvious indicators of schizophrenia. Delusions are also common in schizophrenia, and in Rusi kaka’s case, he feared water.

Another cause of my teenage mortification was that he would hang around the Saddar agiari [place of worship] or the Karachi Parsi Institute (KPI) and ask passers-by for money. In the beginning phase of his schizophrenia he would approach only Parsis, but toward the latter part of his life he was seen begging at traffic signals as well. Perhaps as he grew older there were fewer familiar faces that he could approach.  Even with us, every time we met, he would ask, “Tamhari passey paanch rupiya hosay?” (Would you be having five rupees?). In all the years he asked this question, the amount never changed so there must have been a reason he fixated on this amount, but we never knew what the trigger was. Adding to my self-centred embarrassment, people misunderstood his begging to mean that he was in need of money or was being neglected by his family. Well meaning, if insensitive, people would offer us money to look after him. In the articles written in the media after his death, many former cricketers have also touched on the fact that Rusi kaka lived in penury. This couldn’t be further from fact. Rusi kaka’s begging was never about needing or even wanting money. It was a manifestation of his illness. His brothers would take turns to give him money every day in an effort to stop him from begging, but money had no value for him and people often took advantage of this. People in the neighbourhood would advise us to caution him because they had witnessed how local shopkeepers would not give back change when he paid Rs.100/ for a cold drink or how he would take out all the crumpled bills he had in his pocket and give them to the rickshaw driver regardless of the cost of the ride.

When he was first diagnosed, he was given electric shock therapy (electroconvulsive therapy or ECT) that was prevalent as treatment for schizophrenia in the 1960s. Family lore is that this treatment broke his spirit and caused a sharp decline in his behavior. What is more likely is that his illness just progressed and more characteristic behaviors became apparent, such as disorganized speech with neologisms (gibberish words or phrases that only have meaning to the individual) and perseveration (saying the same thing over and over).  He was on medication, but again that was one of the challenges of caring for him because he would stop taking them. When Sanaullah or my Dad would stand over him and force him, he would keep the tablets in his cheek and spit them out afterwards. Many people with schizophrenia do this because the side effects of the medication, such as muscle spasms and blurred vision, are severely debilitating. Currently, pharmacological companies are developing more effective, orally disintegrating tablets.

In spite of all this, Rusi kaka functioned independently. Many people who have schizophrenia live lives marked by routine and ritual, and Rusi kaka was no different. He would leave the house before sunrise regardless of weather and return at sunset. His love of cricket must have been bred into his cells, because he continued to walk to KPI every day. After his death, Diana and I were touched by the messages we received from KPI “regulars” significantly younger than him who had known him only as a shambling disheveled fixture at KPI and had only heard of his legendary prowess at cricket. We are grateful of their casual acceptance of him because it allowed him to spend his time in a safe place. Many people with obvious mental illnesses are not so fortunate in public because ignorance breeds fear which may lead to hurtful behaviors like name-calling, teasing, shunning, and isolation. Often the stigma is more difficult to deal with than the illness itself.

Rusi kaka passed away in his sleep on 24 March 2014 at the age of 86 after spending more than half his life in his own fragmented mind. Yet in all the years that he was ill, the core of his character – his gentleness – always shone through.

There is no medical test for schizophrenia and the diagnosis is given based on observed behavior. Knowing symptoms and indicators of schizophrenia is particularly important for an insular, interlinked community like ours because of the genetic component of the illness. That said, biology is not destiny. As with conditions like diabetes or male pattern baldness, individuals who are genetically predisposed to schizophrenia do not necessarily develop the disorder. And for many of those who do, they can function independently and live satisfying lives with support from family and community, medication, and ongoing therapy. Unfortunately, when Rusi kaka became ill these kinds of help had not evolved. If his story leads readers to find out more about schizophrenia and treat the people who live with this illness with acceptance, it will be his true legacy beyond that of a talented cricketer with an assured place in history. **

(This article was printed in “Hamazor”, Issue 2/2014 and has been reproduced here with the prior permission of the author and Toxy Cowasjee, Editor Hamazor).

The post A True Legacy: Rusi Dinshaw appeared on Parsi Khabar.

Few people born after 1980 would know of S S Tarapore. He retired from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) as deputy governor at the end of September 1996. When his last day at RBI ended, he refused the official car. He took the lift down, walked out of the gate, hailed a passing cab, and quietly went home.

Article by T C A Srinivasa-Raghavan | Business Standard

His finest years came when he served as deputy governor under C Rangarajan. The mutual understanding and respect led them to reform India’s financial sector and put it on a sound footing.

He was, as many in RBI acknowledge, the central banker’s central banker, a man so steeped in macroeconomic and monetary theory that for more than a decade after he formally left RBI, governors would seek his wisdom.

After retiring, he chaired two committees on full capital account convertibility and one on how to streamline the RBI. Between 1997 and 2016, he wrote and lectured on a scale that is hard to emulate. Through it all, he remained steadfast in his belief that RBI knew what it was doing and ought to be left alone to get on with its job, which was maintaining the monetary stability of India.

He used to get very angry at attempts to reduce RBI’s remit and in recent years became, as it were, the Keeper of the Flame, defending RBI’s faith and its mandate against the barbarians at the gate. He recently described the FSLRC’s attempts at financial reform as “a plot to destroy RBI”. 

For him, RBI was not just another economic institution; it was the final frontier that kept fiscal policy in some sort of check. That he did not always succeed and that often the finance ministry ignored his admonitions, entreaties and wisdom, only to rue the fact later, was not his fault.

I had the privilege of knowing him for nearly a quarter of a century and, in fact, we were to have had lunch at his residence a few days ago. I am now told that if I had not had to call off the meeting, he would have had to, having taken ill.

A more honest man it would be hard to find. A more humble professional possibly doesn’t exist. A less pretentious personality is a rarity. He was, as I discovered, the very embodiment of discretion.

In 2006, RBI asked me to record on audio and video tapes the memories of senior RBI officers to assist with RBI’s history project. Tarapore was an obvious candidate. T K Chakrabarty, who is now retired, and I recorded him for almost 20 hours.

Conscientious as ever, he was the only who came prepared with detailed notes, written in one of those school note books. There were pages and pages of them and he went through the whole lot over two days. As ‘pieces to camera’ went, it was as good as any ever. He was 70 years old then but would speak without pause for an hour at a time.

After the recordings had been deposited with RBI’s archives, something happened to annoy him and he wrote off an angry instruction that his tapes were not to be disclosed to the public for 30 years after he passed on. That means the tapes will become available only in 2046.

More is the pity. He did his duty in cautioning the reckless, whether they were self-seeking politicians or innocent former judges or brash young economists, with a zeal and devotion that earned him the sobriquet of ‘old fashioned’. Calling him names did not, however, reduce the force of his logic and arguments. But death has done that now and India has lost an important nationalist.

On his retirement, S S Tarapore became a columnist with Business Standard and remained one for many years.

The post S S Tarapore: The Diminutive Colossus: Obituary appeared on Parsi Khabar.

The beautiful and heartwarming story of an old man and his Mawa Cake….Watch it and feel a surge of emotions run through you..

The post The Mawa Cake appeared on Parsi Khabar.

When burger chain McDonald’s came to town 20 years ago, exciting the city of Mumbai in the first flush of post-liberalization consumer boom, it worried Farokh Shokriye.

As the man who would later take over Mumbai’s oldest Irani cafe, Kyani & Co., Shokriye wasn’t sure if his humble Parsi chicken patties and traditional mawa cakes would withstand the competition from the mighty Big Mac.

Article by Vidhi Choudhary, livemint.com

They did—and that’s the story of how the more innovative and adaptive of Indian businesses took on their famous foreign rivals after economic reforms were introduced a quarter of a century ago.

Shokriye, who had worked at the beer company London Pilsner for more than a decade, didn’t plan on a life with Kyani and Co., established in 1904 by Iranian (known in India as Parsis) immigrants and operated by his family.

In 2000, Shokriye, then 40 years old, found himself at a crossroads. He could either migrate abroad—like most of his family—or continue his family’s legacy by taking over the Kyani cafe.

“I had plans to migrate abroad to settle down with my family in New Zealand. But somewhere down the line it dawned upon me that that would be very selfish on my part. All my cousins had left for the US; me and a cousin were the only ones left. My father and uncle were in their late 70s and his (father’s) health was also failing.

“The option was to go abroad and forego everything here—forego India, forego the shop, forego the legacy, be a little selfish. Or take over the business and grow. I took a call and thought it would be better if I settled down here in Mumbai and carried on.”

And so it was that Shokriye found himself running the Kyani cafe, a south Mumbai establishment whose high ceilings and period furniture evoke the charm and nostalgia of a bygone era.

“My father, Aflatoon Shokriye, took over the shop in 1959 with his brother-in-law. Since then we have been running the show,” says Shokriye—that’s over half a century.

Iranian immigration to India dates back at least 1,300 years when followers of the Prophet Zarathushtra, known as Zoroastrians, sought refuge in western India (present-day Gujarat and Maharashtra) in order to escape religious persecution. A steady trickle of Zoroastrians and later Iranian Shia Muslims continued into India during the Mughal and then British rule. Today, India is home to the largest Diaspora of Iranian Zoroastrians and Shias outside of Iran.

By the beginning of the 20th century, Irani cafes had sprung up on almost every street corner of Mumbai, Pune and Hyderabad, becoming a symbol of both Iranian cultural integration and distinctiveness.

A hundred years on, ‘Irani’ is just another brand on the streets of Mumbai, the Indian food and beverage market having opened its doors to fast food, fine dining and celebrity chefs with the advent of economic liberalization in 1991.

MORE FROM ‘DAYS OF OUR LIVES’

Kyani had to work hard to stay relevant—from a handful of bakery items, the menu was expanded to reflect more variety. “I remember one Parsi gentleman was working in the Reserve Bank; I was sitting here in the cafe with my dad; he came and told my dad: ‘My dear sir, if you do not grow, in the next 20 years you will be wiped out. You have to grow.’ That went into my mind and I took the initiative,” says Shokriye.

Since 2002, the menu at Kyani has expanded—combinations like chicken/mutton and cheese sandwiches are now available and delectable keema dishes made it to the menu. “We observed that under the old menu, customers used to ask for a certain combination of products—for example, instead of a plain chicken sandwich, they wanted chicken and cheese. But, since it was not on the menu, the waiter would say no and the customer would either leave or settle for the plain sandwich. That’s when the concept of giving more variety came in.”

The changes at Kyani took place amid a virtual revolution in the Indian food and beverages industry in the post-liberalization years. The industry is expected to grow at an average annual pace of 24% to reach Rs.3.8 trillion in sales by 31 March 2017, a report by consulting firm Grant Thornton India and lobby group Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (Ficci) said.

Across India, fast food outlets are emerging as a great leveller as rapid urbanization and the influx of migrants from small towns to the metros make for a more-diverse customer base and consumer habits change. Every fast food chain has affordable offerings on its menu to cater to the changing demography. The fast food brand, which once fed consumers belonging almost exclusively to the high-income groups, has seen the profile of its consumers change. The average walk-in consumer is younger.

Fast-food chains such as McDonald’s, Domino’s Pizza, KFC, Subway, Haldiram’s and Bikanervala are projected to have combined sales of Rs.92,000 crore by 2016-17 as they expand into smaller cities.

Shokriye admits he had apprehensions when McDonald’s first entered India about 20 years ago but today he feels the market has space for everyone to grow. “We have sustained because the population has grown, income levels have gone up. The people who come here, they go to a McDonald’s also. If it’s two days a week there, then the other two days they come here.”

Only three Irani cafes survive in Mumbai now and though Shokriye says these cafes no longer have the comfort zone of the 1980s, his passion for Kyani is unbridled. “I would not like to close down till my last breath,” he said.

“Today, a grandfather comes with his grandchild telling me: ‘I used to come here years back and brought my grandchild to see this place’. That is the attachment people have with Kyani.”

The post The evolution of Kyani and Co. appeared on Parsi Khabar.

Batlivala and Khanabhoy, their Parsi Destination and other stories

by Deepika, hungryforever.com

We arrived at Batlivala and Khanabhoy in Alwarpet late one afternoon. We were handed a beautifully designed aqua coloured menu. We smiled. We were going to love this place.

Uday Balaji wears many hats. Hailing from Coimbatore, he’s an engineer, food enthusiast – who eats too little, great boss and cuisine expert. And when he studies food, he really studies it. He tells food like a story and makes it sound almost dramatic. We sat listening to his stories about Ethiopian food, Parsi traditions, the truth about Maharashtrian food and a whole lot more- when suddenly we remembered..um, the food. And when someone can make you forget lunch, you know they’ve got some magic going for them.

Batlivala and Khanabhoy, for the unassuming Chennai-ite, is a Parsi specialty restaurant. As Uday puts it, B and K is more about destination cuisine. It isn’t about grab and go, nor is it about all under one roof. It’s about understanding the nuances of Parsi cuisine over a plate of some of the finest food from age old recipes.

We couldn’t tell what aromas they were, but they took us home. Half a dozen Russian Chicken Pattices came our way with some refreshing salad. And they were sinfully creamy, they were. It’s the kind of food you want to sit there and love for a while. We sipped on our Lime Sherbets infused with beautifully fresh cardamom and waited to see what else was in store for us.

Ps. Long list to follow. I was reminded of a conveyor belt. Things wouldn’t stop rolling out of that happy kitchen.

Next came Mamaiji- well, at least her famous Prawn Kebabs. And when you think you’ve tried many kebabs and that makes you well, the expert-these come in and change the game. They were little balls of minced prawns in masala rolled in rava and served with a tangy mint chutney. We had them by the dozen.

Along came Kheema Pav. Freshly buttered pav served with an inviting Kheema-didn’t last very long. At this juncture I will move away from the food for just a minute to talk about the absolutely adorable waiters. They’re in white shirts with black suspenders wearing cute little spectacles and just about the jolliest bunch you’d meet. Take your face out of that Kheema and meet them, will you?

I’ll take a deep breath and introduce Gravy cutlets. Hah. I know what your non-Parsi brain is thinking. Cutlets, sheesh! But while that may be so for the average cutlet, you’re sadly misinformed. Huge juicy mutton cutlets, spiced and dunked in tangy tomato gravy. Amen.

We were a little apprehensive when Uday suggested the Sali per Eedu Cupcakes– Baked Egg Cupcakes stuffed with Kheema. If you’re like me you’re also wondering what business Kheema has with a cupcake. But imagine this. Someone took out flour and cream from your cupcake (Calm down) and threw in a moist egg layer and wrapped some of that spicy kheema in it. Not only did they do that but they threw on some Sali, fried potato sticks. If you’re still not thinking that kheema, potato and egg can work wonders, you haven’t met Batlivala or Khanabhoy.

To snack on between the starters and the main course, Batlivala brings out some home style Akoori. This is a mix of hard boiled eggs, diced in a nutty sauce. The combination worked so well as a pre-main-course. You should give it a shot. Maybe a spoon or two while you’re looking at the menu.

Just when you’re dreaming about that cupcake and smelling your Kheema hands, Uday brings out the big guns. This dish had me thinking, questioning actually, why I’ve lived my life eating Dal without Mutton. Take it from a chicken-itarian, I wouldn’t go out and order lamb unless thrust into my hands. But this Dhansak will have you cheating on chicken. (No!)

Served with caramelized brown rice and kachuber, you can’t just get through this dish without happy tears.

We had to have pre-dessert, didn’t we?

Red Prawn curry with steamed rice came by. Fresh prawns in a tomato based gravy will take you somehow to your Patti’s kitchen. No, not your Parsi Patti. Your South Indian one.

Happy endings come in small dessert bowls. Ravo, which is a creamy kheer, is what dreams are made of. Lagan nu Custard is a rich pudding topped with fried nuts- served at Parsi weddings. And Kopra Pak Shot is coconut soaked in rose water and topped with nutmeg. I’m a coconut lover, so for me this is happiness in a glass. But for you non-nutters, go for the Ravo.

If it wasn’t evident, we enjoyed our Parsi experience. Batlivala and Khanabhoy is opening its doors pretty soon and we suggest you get through them.

The post Chennai’s Newest Parsi Restaurant: Batlivala and Khanabhoy appeared on Parsi Khabar.

Indian-origin British entrepreneur Lord Karan Bilimoria has been appointed as the Chairman of the Advisory Board of the prestigious Cambridge Judge Business School.

Bilimoria, 54, Founder and Chairman of the Cobra Beer, is a cross-bench (independent) Peer in the House of Lords.

He was born in Hyderabad and educated at the Osmania University. He moved to London, qualified as a chartered accountant and graduated in law from the University of Cambridge. He is also a graduate of the Presidents’ Leadership Programme at Harvard Business School.

Since founding Cobra Beer in 1989, Bilimoria has taken a number of positions in business and industry, including serving as Non-Executive Director and Senior Independent Director of Booker Group.

In Parliament, Bilimoria serves as the founding Chair of the Zoroastrian All Party Parliamentary Group and a Vice Chair of the Indo-British All Party Parliamentary Group. He is the first Zoroastrian Parsi to sit in the House of Lords.

Cambridge Judge Business School is the business school of the University of Cambridge. Established in 1954 as Management Studies in the Engineering Department and in 1990 as Judge Institute for Management Studies, the School is a provider of management education and is consistently ranked as one of the world’s top business schools

The post Lord Karan Bilimoria Named Chairman of Cambridge School’s Board appeared on Parsi Khabar.

What one word comes to mind when you think Crochet, Charity and Achievement? Zoroastrian.

Article by Mehernaaz Shovir Irani |Co-Editor Parsi Khabar

Early this year, a determined lady named Subashri Natrajan from Chennai decided that she wanted to create a Guiness World Record in crocheting the world’s largest blanket by beating a group of women in South Africa who had created a record with a 3347 sq. mtrs. crocheted blanket. Mrs. Natrajan realized that if she wanted to do this, she had to involve others. So was born Mother India’s Crochet Queens in August 2015, a facebook group that welcomed Indian women from across the world to crochet 40X40 inch blankets, which would then be joined to make the big blanket that would hopefully surpass the South African record. The rules were strict, in keeping with the Guiness World Record guidelines but there was no restriction on age, talent, creativity and innovation. Crochet is a beloved craft across generations, communities and sexes too. Soon enough, MICQ as we called it took on a life of its own. With facebook and extensive use of Whatsapp to keep all the members together and informed, at last count we were 2472 strong, from age 8 to 95, who contributed any number between 1 and 101 blankets to the cause and at a stupendous and really mind-boggling 11,148 sq. mtrs. the MICQ now holds the Guiness World Record for the worlds largest crochet blanket. And every one of these blankets has already been sent to various scrutinized NGOs and other charitable institutions for donation amongst children, differently abled and the aged who are not as fortunate as us.

So with something so monumental going on, that involved achieving a crochet milestone and giving forward, Zoroastrian women couldn’t possibly be left out. Zoroastrians, particularly Parsis love to crochet. At my wedding I was sent off with a big bag full of crocheted beauties lovingly made by my mother and Bapaiji (paternal grandmother) over my lifetime. My favourite clothes through the years have been the crochet blouses my Bapaiji made and every Zoro home has at least 1 item crocheted by hand.

Within MICQ, there were 8 Zoroastrian members; 7 in Mumbai and 1 from Bangalore. The first one to join was Dina Sengupta (nee Minocher) from Bangalore who joined as soon as MICQ was born. She runs a daycare centre and is a private tutor by profession but is a crafter at heart dabbling in various creative activities. She learnt to crochet 2 years ago as part of another Crochet with a Cause event and she was hooked to the hook. She expanded her repertoire to include various other things of use. Her zeal for the craft and her commitment to the cause resulted in 15 blankets.

From Mumbai, the first ones to join were Firooza and her mother Prochi Tachakra. Both are extremely enthusiastic and proactive women and active members of the Girl Guiding Movement. Mrs. Prochi Tachakra is a lifelong Girl Guide holding the post of District Commissioner, Guides, Central Mumbai, is a Leader Trainer and has been widely decorated with awards, most prestigious of which are the Silver Star National Award for contribution to Guiding as also the Asia Pacific Adult Leadership Award. The MICQ movement was Prochi’s opportunity to contribute to Society and do the Good Turn, a pillar of the Guiding movement that is the practice of the promise of Service. She has come away with a feeling of achievement and a sense of satisfaction.

For Firooza, who didn’t even know how to crochet the basic pattern of the blanket, the aspect of giving that this movement had conceived came very close to home when she was busy crocheting at the hospital during her father’s brief illness. A lady with an 8 month old baby in the ICU offered to buy the blanket as a comforter for her child. Refusing payment, Firooza gifted that blanket for the little one as a good health blessing. And then she went on to teach other to crochet and make 9 blankets herself. Firooza will cherish the various unforgettable extraordinary experiences of this journey.

Jennifer Daruvala of Dadar Parsi Colony took a break from work to care for her 3 children. Being enterprising she started a small cake and paper stencils for parsi rangoli business from home. When she came across Firooza’s call to join she immediately jumped in. Her desire to learn crochet from her college days, even as a left hander helped her to self learn through observation and a bit of Google. The joy of the craft and the noble cause kept her going and she made 3 when she wasn’t even sure of 1.

I’ve grown up with an immensely talented Bapaiji who created beautiful things throughout her life and which was her livelihood. And as is tradition, she imparted the knowledge of her arts to my mum Behroz Sam Wadia and me as a schoolgirl. So creating is in my blood and my mum’s (my Mamaiji was very creative too). For the both of us and more so my mother, any phase when we’re not crocheting, doing some cross stitch project, making a toran or just doing anything creative with our hands is a phase of restlessness and discomfort. My mum often complains, kantalo aavech, jiv ghabraich … su banau? And goes quickly from one project to another. So this movement was like manna from heaven. We started whole heartedly, sometimes getting frustrated when the elusive 40 inches just didn’t happen inspite of what seemed like endless crocheting. But we made our 2 blankets each and felt like we’d achieved something fabulous. Of course the Guiness World Record was a huge draw. I mean, to achieve something so prestigious by doing something wonderfully simple that we love to do … no brainer that. And as a tribute to my Bapaiji, I wore a ‘kor’ embroidered by her to the final event so in that small way she could be a part of this achievement.

Gover Allamurad Khushnami from Dadar Parsi Colony is 73 years old and runs a general store. Her long standing hobby is to sit at the store in the evenings and crochet caps and sweaters. Her eyesight is failing but her fingers are deft and practiced and she not only completed her 2 blankets but also took away her daughter Mahnaz Shapur Faroodi’s blanket to complete. She just didn’t want to stop and regrets the fact that she found out about the movement too late to contribute more. Mahnaz, who has been teaching since 21 years at the DPYA School, most definitely inherited the love of crochet from her mother and makes quite a few things herself whilst juggling the very demanding life of a school teacher and an LIC Agent. Crocheting her 2 blankets was pure joy for her and her mother and they’re eager for and open to any such future projects.

This movement brought a lot of beautiful aspects of life and human behavior to the fore. Resolve, courage, determination, encouragement, empowerment, camaraderie and solidarity and the spirit of coming together to achieve great things. Women found a purpose where they may have had none; they discovered new skills, rekindled lost passions, rediscovered happiness. As Dina says, the lives of women have been transformed – so many overcame depression and purposelessness, found the will to recover from illnesses, found a purpose in life, became heroes, earned respect and discovered their own humanity. Best of all, we stretched the limits of our mind to create and to enhance the beautiful making it awe-inspiringly beautiful.

A lot of laughter, new friendships and tremendous amounts of hard work later, we 8 Zoroastrians, amongst the 2472 women are Officially Awesome holders of a Guiness World Record. When the Record Adjudicator announced the final measurements, the collective joy of all the women present was the culmination of months of effort and coordination and pushing our personal boundaries and a very resounding declaration of Yes We Can. It was a celebration of life and women and giving and we Zoroastrians were honoured and proud to represent our culture and talents alongside all the other achievers. All of us will wonder who finally received our blankets and our hearts and minds will automatically say a prayer to God to bless that soul and then say thank you for acting through Subashri Natarajan and allowing us to bring warmth and a little anonymous love to someone less fortunate whilst making our lives a little more beautiful.

The post The Guiness Record Holding Zoroastrian Woman’s Journey appeared on Parsi Khabar.

There has been recent euphoria about a Bollywood actress being one of the presenters at the Oscars Award Ceremony. However it is worth nothing that over 35 years ago the first Indian to do so also happened to be a Parsi.

The fantastic pathbreaking actress Persis Khambatta presented the award with William Shatner.

The post Persis Khambatta: The First Indian and Parsi At the Oscars appeared on Parsi Khabar.

Dolly Dastoor a dear friend and mentor of Parsi Khabar and the current editor of the FEZANA Journal, and past President of FEZANA was one of the 50 prominent Indo Canadians on “The A-List”. She and others were recently honoured at a glittering function in Ottawa.

Fifty prominent Indo-Canadians were recognized in Ottawa recently for promoting and fostering India-Canada relations.

Carleton University hosted a celebration of their achievements on Feb. 4, alongside a launch for The A-List, a book compilation of their stories written by Indo-Canadian journalist, Ajit Jain.

Article by Eddie Ameh | New Canadian Media

Now in its second edition, The A-List features Canadians of Indian origin who through their various careers and community efforts have helped promote relations between the two countries. This year’s event also celebrated three Canadians considered “friends of India” who have made similar efforts.

An all-inclusive list

Four cabinet members from the new Liberal government were recognized for bringing joy and pride to the Indo-Canadian community.

Minister for infrastructure, Amarjeet Sohi; minister for small businesses and tourism, Bardish Chagger; national defence minister, Harjit Sajjan, as well as Navdeep Bains, minister of innovation, science and economic development make up the highest number of Indo-Canadians in the federal cabinet in the history of Canada.

They also set the record as the highest number of cabinet ministers appointed who are visible minorities from one particular country.

“They have raised the profile of other Indo-Canadians to greater heights by virtue of leadership in their respective fields.”

In addition, the list includes 90-year-old world-renowned geologist Dr. Deshbandhu Sikka, who discovered magnetic iron ore deposits in Kudremukh, Karnataka, India. Sikka also discovered gold and copper deposits in billions of quantities in India’s Madhya Pradesh.

The A-List also features 24-year-old Manasvi Noel, currently Miss India-Canada, who was born in Dubai to Indian parents and immigrated to Canada. She traveled to Mumbai to learn belly dancing, which she performed at the Miss India-Canada competition.

“They have raised the profile of other Indo-Canadians to greater heights by virtue of leadership in their respective fields,” said Jain at the launch.

A-Listers are ‘bridge builders’

According to The A-List, between 1946 and 1955, there were a total of 1,100 Indians, then referred to as persons of East Indian origin, in Canada. Today, there are more than one million Indo-Canadians in Canada.

There are now 20 members of Parliament (MPs) of Indian descent – four of whom are cabinet ministers in Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government – compared to in 1993 when there were just three MPs.

“What a proud moment it is for us,” Jain said.

“What a proud moment it is for us.”

The A-List was created to honour Indo-Canadians who continue to inspire others in the diaspora.

“They are the bridge builders between Canada and India,” Jain added.

President of Carleton University, Roseann O’Reilly Runte, commended the efforts and services of those who made the list in fostering stronger ties between Canada and India. She called their stories “very extraordinary.”

Runte went on to acknowledge the growing ties between Canada and India as “a great partnership.”

She said this was special because Canadian and Indian collaboration in education has a rich history, hence Carleton University hosting the book launch. Currently, the school has partnered with other universities in India where students embark on exchange programs.

Runte said Carleton University has more students who have gone to India than any other university in Ontario.

Great, pluralism and jugaad

Eight out of the 50 people named in The A-List were present at the ceremony and received copies of the book from Runte.

“There are three things that define us as Indo-Canadians,” said Dilip Soman, professor of marketing at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management. “These three things are great, pluralism and jugaad.”

Jugaad is a Hindi word, which means the ability to improvise and make do with what’s available.

“… [W]e need to think about ways we can better support new Indo-Canadians and help them succeed.”

Soman, who moved to Canada 14 years ago from the U.S., was also named in The A-List. He said he was honoured to be recognized and that there are others who are also promoting Indo-Canadian relations positively in their own endeavours.

“The A-List is amazing, but I think it is just [the] tip of the iceberg,” he said. “There are many people who I think are doing amazing works, but are not on The A-List.”

He added, “There are a lot of people whose works go unrecognized because there isn’t enough in terms of pages.”

Soman said there there are also people who will not be written about because they may not have the opportunity to achieve success.

“As a country and as a community, we need to think about ways we can better support new Indo-Canadians and help them succeed in anything that they choose to do,” he said.

The best way to avoid situations where Indo-Canadians do not achieve their dreams when they come to Canada, he explained, is to support them when they first arrive in the country.

He also urged his other colleagues on The A-List to learn from each other and build a more solid Indo-Canadian community.

The A-List, which has already recognized the work of 100 Indo-Canadians, will honour more in the coming years, as Jain and his team have already started the 2017 list.

This content was developed exclusively for New Canadian Media and can be re-published with appropriate attribution. For syndication rights, please write to publisher@newcanadianmedia.ca

The post Dolly Dastoor Among Fifty Indo-Canadians Honoured as ‘Bridge Builders’ appeared on Parsi Khabar.

UPDATE: Since posting this article, Jame-Jamshed reports

#‎BreakingNews‬

Percy Hansotia and Kiazad Sethna have moved the Bharuch District Court and filed for a Stay against the shifting of the 700-year-old Doongaji Agiary Fire.

A move to shift the 700-year-old holy fire from a shut Bharuch fire temple to a soon-to-open agiary in Kopar Khairane has sparked yet another battle between traditionalists and modernists in the Parsi community.

Those who want the holy fire moved contend that Bharuch agiary is virtually defunct, with the population in the Gujarati city coming down to barely a 100 people. With the number of people on the fringes of Navi Mumbai growing rapidly, a fire temple in Kopar Khairane will only benefit those Parsis having to commute to Thane, Vikhroli or Dadar to access an agiary, they said.

Those against the move claim the religion does not allow a holy fire to be moved from its original site. They also fear the Kopar Khairane agiary will become accessible to non-Parsis too.

Purists argue that the moment the holy fire is shifted from the sanctified position, its spiritual power built over centuries due to prayer and consecration will wane.

Sources in the community said a similar attempt 25 years ago to shift the holy fire to the agiary in Vikhroli’s Godrej Baug was challenged in court and was stayed.

The Fire Temple at Bharuch remains closed and locked most of the time. Hardly any worshippers visit the agiary as there are fewer than 100 Zoroastrians living in Bharuch, most of whom are aged. Further, the location is very difficult to access. Keeping in mind the above objectives, we the Head Priests recommend the transfer of the Holy Fire to Kopar khairane, Navi Mumbai, where about 450 Parsis have already established themselves and are eagerly awaiting an Agiary.

The letter is signed by four dastoorjis – Dasturji Kaishushroo M Janaspasa, Dasturji Peshotan H Mirza, Dasturji Firoze M Kotwal, Dasturji Khurshed K Dastoor.

The two priests whose signatures are awaited are: Dasturji KND Meherji Rana and Dasturji Cyrus Dastoor.

Some priests in Bharuch, like Navroze and Vispi Dinshawji Dastoor, serving in Bharuch and Ankleshwar respectively, wrote to the Parsi periodical to clarify that despite being an old priestly family of Bharuch, the trustees of Bharuch Anjuman had not informed them about the tharav (sanctioning the shifting of the holy fire).

Noshir Parlewala, trustee, New Bombay Zoroastrian Charitable Trust (NBZCT) said, “No one was bothered about the Bharuch agiary till we decided to move it, and now suddenly some people are creating problems for personal gains.”

Social media abuzz

Ranged against the NBZCT is a group of Parsis headed by two residents of Ankleshwar, a small town in Bharuch, Percy Hansotia and Kaizad Sethna. It was Sethna’s father who had moved the Bharuch District Court and got a stay order against the move to bring the fire to Vikhroli 25 years ago.

“Many agiaries in Mumbai, Navsari and Surat are kept under lock and key for the better part of the day. Udvada’s Parsi population is only 40, yet people come from all over the world to worship there. The vada dastoorjis (high priests), instead of putting the blame on the padshah saheb (holy fire) and shifting him, should instead reinstall faith in the padshah sahibs,” said Hansotia.

Hansotia said in a recent Facebook post in a group called, ‘Parsi Irani Proud Zoroastrians’ that moving the holy fire will amount to desecration and that Section 295 (defiling places of worship) and 295A (insulting religious beliefs) of the Indian Penal Code can be applied. But NBZCT president Sharukh Doctor is unmoved.

“There are some people who are trying to create problems,” said Doctor. “There is no opposition from the high priests or the Bharuch Parsi Panchayat. The fire will be moved. It will come to Navi Mumbai. All rituals for the shifting will be followed precisely. A small fire (‘Dadgi’) will continue to burn at the Bharuch agiary so that it remains pious.”

Hansotia countered that it would be impossible to follow all rituals if the fire is shifted.

“How will they water and clean the roads from Bharuch to Navi Mumbai?” he asked on Facebook. “Will they be able to stop the traffic on both sides in the two cities and on National Highway 8? How will they cross the rivers and maintain ‘jameen nu peban’?”(Religious rules say the flame should always touch the earth)

Hansotia and Sethna are expected to move court and they have support from Mumbai and Gujarat. Rayomand Zaiwala, a Mumbai resident said on Facebook: “These people who challenge God and the vast universe controlled by him have not understood the term ‘Rage of the Angels’. There is just no escape from it.”

The post Bid To Move Bharuch’s 700-Yr-Old Doongaji Agiary To Navi Mumbai Divides Parsis appeared on Parsi Khabar.

Regular readers of Parsi Khabar will remember our article from 2012 on Nergis Mavalvala. The brilliant professor of physics at MIT is in the news again as one of the lead researchers who has worked on the project that led to first detection of gravitational waves. Nergis has been involved with the project practically from its beginning .

Dinsha Mistree a dear friend of Parsi Khabar, tipped us off about this connection also informs us that she spoke about her work on gravitational waves and her experiences in science at the 5th World Zoroastrian Youth Congress 2011 in Vancouver.

LIGO scientists (from left) Matthew Evans, Nergis Mavalvala, and Erotokritos Katsavounidis discuss the research with audience members at the MIT event. Photo: M. Scott Brauer

Scientists make first direct detection of gravitational waves

LIGO signal reveals first observation of two massive black holes colliding, proves Einstein right.

Almost 100 years ago today, Albert Einstein predicted the existence of gravitational waves — ripples in the fabric of space-time that are set off by extremely violent, cosmic cataclysms in the early universe. With his knowledge of the universe and the technology available in 1916, Einstein assumed that such ripples would be “vanishingly small” and nearly impossible to detect. The astronomical discoveries and technological advances over the past century have changed those prospects.

Now for the first time, scientists in the LIGO Scientific Collaboration — with a prominent role played by researchers at MIT and Caltech — have directly observed the ripples of gravitational waves in an instrument on Earth. In so doing, they have again dramatically confirmed Einstein’s theory of general relativity and opened up a new way in which to view the universe.

But there’s more: The scientists have also decoded the gravitational wave signal and determined its source. According to their calculations, the gravitational wave is the product of a collision between two massive black holes, 1.3 billion light years away — a remarkably extreme event that has not been observed until now.

The researchers detected the signal with the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) — twin detectors carefully constructed to detect incredibly tiny vibrations from passing gravitational waves. Once the researchers obtained a gravitational signal, they converted it into audio waves and listened to the sound of two black holes spiraling together, then merging into a larger single black hole.

Left to right: David Shoemaker, Rainer Weiss, Matthew Evans, Erotokritos Katsavounidis, Nergis Mavalvala, and Peter Fritschel. Photo: Bryce Vickmark

“We’re actually hearing them go thump in the night,” says Matthew Evans, an assistant professor of physics at MIT. “We’re getting a signal which arrives at Earth, and we can put it on a speaker, and we can hear these black holes go, ‘Whoop.’ There’s a very visceral connection to this observation. You’re really listening to these things which before were somehow fantastic.”

By further analyzing the gravitational signal, the team was able to trace the final milliseconds before the black holes collided. They determined that the black holes, 30 times as massive as our sun, circled each other at close to the speed of light before fusing in a collision and giving off an enormous amount of energy equivalent to about three solar masses — according to Einstein’s equation E=mc² — in the form of gravitational waves.

“Most of that energy is released in just a few tenths of a second,” says Peter Fritschel, LIGO’s chief detector scientist and a senior research scientist at MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. “For a very short amount of time, the actual power in gravitational waves was higher than all the light in the visible universe.”

These waves then rippled through the universe, effectively warping the fabric of space-time, before passing through Earth more than a billion years later as faint traces of their former, violent origins.

“It’s a spectacular signal,” says Rainer Weiss, a professor emeritus of physics at MIT. “It’s a signal many of us have wanted to observe since the time LIGO was proposed. It shows the dynamics of objects in the strongest gravitational fields imaginable, a domain where Newton’s gravity doesn’t work at all, and one needs the fully non-linear Einstein field equations to explain the phenomena. The triumph is that the waveform we measure is very well-represented by solutions of these equations. Einstein is right in a regime where his theory has never been tested before.”

The new results are published today in the journal Physical Review Letters.

“Magnificently in alignment”

The first evidence for gravitational waves came in 1974, when physicists Russell Hulse and Joseph Taylor discovered a pair of neutron stars, 21,000 light years from Earth, that seemed to behave in a curious pattern. They deduced that the stars were orbiting each other in such a way that they must be losing energy in the form of gravitational waves — a detection that earned the researchers the Nobel Prize in physics in 1993.

Now LIGO has made the first direct observation of gravitational waves with an instrument on Earth. The researchers detected the gravitational waves on September 14, 2015, at 5:51 a.m. EDT, using the twin LIGO interferometers, located in Livingston, Louisiana and Hanford, Washington.

Each L-shaped interferometer spans 4 kilometers in length and uses laser light split into two beams that travel back and forth through each arm, bouncing between precisely configured mirrors. Each beam monitors the distance between these mirrors, which, according to Einstein’s theory, will change infinitesimally when a gravitational wave passes by the instrument. 

“You can almost visualize it as if you dropped a rock on the surface of a pond, and the ripple goes out,” says Nergis Malvalvala, the Curtis and Kathleen Marble Professor of Astrophysics at MIT. “[It’s] something that distorts the space time around it, and that distortion propagates outward and reaches us on Earth, hundreds of millions of light years later.”

Last March, researchers completed major upgrades to the interferometers, known as Advanced LIGO, increasing the instruments’ sensitivity and enabling them to detect a change in the length of each arm, smaller than one-ten-thousandth the diameter of a proton. By September, they were ready to start observing with them.

“The effect we’re measuring on Earth is equivalent to measuring the distance to the closest star, Alpha Centauri, to within a few microns,” Evans says. “It’s a very tough measurement to make. Einstein expected this to never have been pulled off.”

Nevertheless, a signal came through. Using Einstein’s equations, the team analyzed the signal and determined that it originated from a collision between two massive black holes.

“We thought it was going to be a huge challenge to prove to ourselves and others that the first few signals that we saw were not just flukes and random noise,” says David Shoemaker, director of the MIT LIGO Laboratory. “But nature was just unbelievably kind in delivering to us a signal that’s very large, extremely easy to understand, and absolutely, magnificently in alignment with Einstein’s theory.”

For LIGO’s hundreds of scientists, this new detection of gravitational waves marks not only a culmination of a decades-long search, but also the beginning of a new way to look at the universe.

“This really opens up a whole new area for astrophysics,” Evans says. “We always look to the sky with telescopes and look for electromagnetic radiation like light, radio waves, or X-rays. Now gravitational waves are a completely new way in which we can get to know the universe around us.”

Tiny detection, massive payoff

LIGO research is carried out by the LIGO Scientific Collaboration (LSC), a group of some 950 scientists at universities around the United States, including MIT, and in 15 other countries. The LIGO Observatories are operated by MIT and Caltech. The instruments were first explored as a means to detect gravitational waves in the 1970s by Weiss, who along with Kip Thorne and Ronald Drever from Caltech proposed LIGO in the 1980s.

“This has been 20 years of work, and for some of us, even more,” Evans says. “It’s been a long time working on these detectors, without seeing anything. So it’s a real sea change and an interesting psychological change for the whole collaboration.”

“The project represents a triumph for federally funded research,” says Maria Zuber, vice president for research and E. A. Griswold Professor of Geophysics at MIT. “LIGO is an example of a high-risk, high-return investment in discovery-driven science. In this case the investment was major and sustained over many years, with a successful outcome far from assured. But the scientific payoff is shaping up to be extraordinary. While the discoveries reported here are already magnificent, they represent the tip of the iceberg of what will be learned about fundamental physics and the nature of the universe.”

The LIGO Observatories are due for more upgrades in the near future. Currently, the instruments are performing at one-third of their projected sensitivity. Once they are fully optimized, Shoemaker predicts that scientists will be able to detect gravitational waves emanating “from the edge of the universe.”

“In a few years, when this is fully commissioned, we should be seeing events from a whole variety of objects: black holes, neutron stars, supernova, as well as things we haven’t imagined yet, on the frequency of once a day or once a week, depending on how many surprises are out there.” Shoemaker says. “That’s our dream, and so far we don’t have any reason to know that that’s not true.”

As for this new gravitational signal, Weiss, who first came up with the rudimentary design for LIGO in the 1970s as part of an experimental exercise for one of his MIT courses, sees the tiny detection as a massive payoff.

“This is the first real evidence that we’ve seen now of high-gravitational field strengths: monstrous things like stars, moving at the velocity of light, smashing into each other and making the geometry of space-time turn into some sort of washing machine,” Weiss says. “And this horrendously strong thing made a very tiny effect in our apparatus, a relative motion of 10 to the minus 18 meters between the mirrors in the interferometer arms. It’s sort of unbelievable to think about.”

This research was funded by the National Science Foundation.

The post Nergis Mavalvala and First Direct Detection of Gravitational Waves appeared on Parsi Khabar.

Often, during first-time meetings with non-Zoroastrians, when I identify myself as a ‘Zoroastrian’, I get a puzzled look in response. When I say ‘Parsi’, they ease up and smile and promptly quote a list of friends expecting me to know them or be somehow related to them. The impression everyone is under is that ‘everyone knows everyone in the community’ because we are so few in number and live in tightly-knit communities. As a result, for instant acknowledgement from the world, many of us have come to use the words interchangeably, which has not only further encouraged this misunderstanding but will eventually make the world forget who we truly are.

Article by Dilaira Dubash | The Express Tribune

A recent example is the identification of one of our brightest young minds, Nergis Mavalvala, in local publications. The scientist who was part of a team responsible for the recent detection of gravitational waves belongs to the illustrious Zoroastrian community, but she was first identified as a Parsi. Have you ever come across an article on a celebrated Pakistani Muslim or for that matter even a Christian or Hindu whose sect or denomination took centre-stage as their religious identity? Nergis Mavalvala is indeed a Parsi, but we all fall under the larger umbrella of Zoroastrians.

To get to the root of the problem, let me now indulge you in a history lesson. Zoroastrianism is the ancient religion of Persia or modern-day Iran and adherents of the faith are called Zoroastrians. After the Arab invasion of the country in 630 AD, a vast majority were massacred and those who survived were forced into slavery or converted. To escape persecution, many Zoroastrians fled Persia for the safety of the Indian subcontinent and that’s where the chapter on Parsis begins: the Zoroastrians of Persia who settled in India became known as Parsis.

It really irks me when I read entries such as ‘Parsiism’ or ‘Parseeism’ in the online encyclopaedia Britannica, which describes it as how the religion came to be known in India. Indian Zoroastrians (Parsis), and those who later migrated from India to other countries, might identify themselves as Parsis, but if you ask them about their faith, the chance of them saying ‘Parsiism’ is as good as Indian-occupied Kashmir becoming a part of Pakistan. Although it is true that during the process of assimilation, Indian Zoroastrians adopted many of the traits of the dominant culture, such as wearing a sari and making a rangoli to mark a festive occasion, they still recite the same prayers and bow down before the same God. At the World Zoroastrian Congress, which is held almost every year, Zoroastrians from across the globe gather under a single roof and participate in discussions to extend knowledge about one of the world’s oldest monotheistic religions. We celebrate the traditions we adopted in India and we also pay tribute to our Persian heritage. Many of us are proud Parsis, but all of us are zealous Zoroastrians.

Today, Zoroastrians are scattered across the globe. We are perhaps the world’s smallest stateless religious minority and face imminent extinction, yet we have left an indelible mark upon this planet. Since our endless contributions to society will be the only legacy we leave behind, all I ask is when the world fondly remembers the likes of Nergis Mavalvala for being part of important breakthroughs and advancements, we would like to be celebrated as Zoroastrians. If every Zoroastrian is first identified as a Parsi, Google will deceive entire generations long after us into believing that ‘Parsiism’ was actually a religion.

The post We’re Zoroastrians first appeared on Parsi Khabar.

Now working at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory(LIGO)

in the United States, Dr Nergis Mavalvala still thanks a bicycle repairman in Karachi for her hands-on skills.

by Yusra Salim, Tribune

“One of my formative experiences in Karachi happened when, as a 10-year-old, I would take my bicycle to the bike repair shop right outside our apartment compound,” she recalls in an interview with The Express Tribune. “Rather than just repairing my bike for me, the man at the shop taught me how to do the repairs myself.”

Once she learned the technique, she would just borrow the tools from the mechanic. Perhaps her formative experiences living on Karachi’s McNeil Road came in handy when she moved to the US as a teenager and went on to attend Wellesley College in Massachusetts.

With a team of scientists, the Pakistan-born astrophysicist recently announced the confirmation of gravitational waves – a major prediction of Albert Einstein’s 1915 general theory of relativity – opening an unprecedented new window onto the cosmos.

What next?

Nergis, who lives with her partner and a son in Boston, and works at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), plans to continue working on improving the sensitivity of the LIGO detectors.

“We have ideas for that already and the future of the field is bright,” she says. “We have just heard the very first cosmic sounds. As our instruments improve, we expect to collect much more information about the universe and learn about things we didn’t even know existed.”

But how did she come to work on such a massive project? “I kind of stumbled upon it mostly by accident,” she recalls.

During her first year in the PhD program at MIT in Cambridge, Nergis was looking for a professor to work with. She joined the team after a brief conversation with Professor Rainer Weiss, who invented the concept behind LIGO.

Karachi rendezvous

Born in May 1968, Nergis went to the Convent of Jesus and Mary from pre-K through O-levels. “It’s funny to remember now but the teacher comments on my report cards were very much the same: smart kid, too talkative and hard to control,” she says.

In her entire journey from Karachi to LIGO, her family has always been supportive of her. They had prioritised Nergis’s and her sister’s education even when it was not easy for them.

“Education was an important value in our family,” she says. “While some family members don’t fully understand what I do, but they love what I do because I love what I do!”

Her fondest memories of Karachi are the people she grew up with – her friends at school, her family and the tight-knit Zoroastrian community – the incredible warmth and hospitality prevalent in the Pakistani culture and the food. “I miss those things to this day,” she says.

The astrophysicist is also surprised by the attention her role in the discovery has gotten in Pakistan. While she expected a lot of excitement worldwide about the discovery, she has been stunned by the amount of focus on her personally back home. “It has been a wonderful surprise,” she says.

Family’s reaction

Natasha Mavalvala, Nergis’s aunt from her extended family in Karachi, is also happy at the success achieved by her niece. “She was a bright and studious child and today she has made us all proud,” she told The Express Tribune.

While it has been years since the family has met Nergis, she still holds a special place in their hearts. “Nergis was very young when she left Karachi but she has made us, her parents and the country proud,” Natasha adds.

Rustom Darrah, the only maternal uncle of Nergis, also remembers her as an intelligent and hardworking girl. “I last met her when she came to Karachi for my daughter’s wedding about six years ago,” he says. “I knew this girl will do something big in life.”

Published in The Express Tribune, February 16^th, 2016.

The post Karachi bike repairman inspired Mavalvala appeared on Parsi Khabar.

My dear wife Dinsoo passed away at the WZO Trust Funds Senior Citizens Centre at Navsari on 24th December 2015 around 7 am.

EXPERIENCES OF MY SOJOURN AT NAVSARI 

By Dara M. Rivetna, Chicago.

I reside in Chicago, but for the last many years we have been spending the winter months in Mumbai as my wife Dinsoo had been keeping indifferent health and unable to bear the severe cold of Chicago.

During our sojourns in India, I used to volunteer for work with the WZO Trust Funds, visit houses of beneficiaries at Mumbai and other places to investigate firsthand the appeals they received for a variety of causes. Dinsoo & I also visited the villages of Gujarat with Bachi & Dinshaw Tamboly, and raised funds for converting a few huts into cottages, besides personally donating ourselves for the replacement of a few huts into cottages.

This year, Dinsoo’s health took a turn for the worse, and being unable to look after her on my own, I requested Bachi Tamboly, who is in charge of the WZO Trust Funds Senior Citizens Centres to allow Dinsoo to stay there for a few months before our return to Chicago in the summer of 2016.  

Thanks to the kindness and help of Bachi and Dinshaw Tamboly we were allowed to stay at the WZO Trust Funds Senior Centre.  Dinsoo and I arrived at the centre in Navsari on October 27, 2015 by a private taxi from Dadar, Mumbai where we stay at our Nephew’s house in Dadar. It was our intention to spend the rest of our time at Navsari during this trip to India till our return to Chicago in summer.

Let me first tell you all a few things about the centre. It is a place for elderly retired persons, 60 years and more who are mobile and able to look after their personal needs. It is like home in some ways and for many a resident it is more than home. It is here that they come to spend the evening of their life. Most residents are single except a couple of husbands and wives.

No matter the disability everyone is treated with respect and dignity. Residents help each other with small chores. One can stay to himself or socialize – to each his own. Some residents stay in common room where there are 4 residents to a room. There are rooms where there are two to a room and some rooms are singles.

Residents are allowed to go out at their will, the only thing is that they  have to inform the manager that they will be out, which of course is for their safety and well- being. The day starts at 7:00am for tea. Breakfast is at 9:00am and most residents take their shower get ready by breakfast and then it is leisure time till lunch, which is at 12:30pm. After lunch it is siesta time till 4:00pm when it is afternoon tea and breakfast (what we call snack) Lot of seniors go for a walk in the neighborhoods, some sit on the veranda and gossip. At 8:00pm is call to dinner. All meals are served in the dining room.

Allow me to give you an idea of what we eat. Sample breakfast—it is either Parsi Poro; akuri; Masala eggs; scrambled eggs; Upma with lots of vegetables and nuts; Thepela, etc. There is always a choice of rotli or bread slices with butter and jam.

Sample lunch – DhanDhar ne patio; curry rice with fried slice of fish, kacumber+Lemon; Masala na Dhar chawl with cucumber; Khichdi ne dahi ni kadhi+papad; Parsi style Rus chawal – often there is a piece of fried fish such as a Pomfret or Boi.

Sample Dinner – rai na papata+murghi in masala; Turkey chicken; guvar-sing; girola; some vegetable or the other, chana ni dhar with shish-kebab. Homemade pickles are always available.

A portion of the food is preplaced on the plate and there are ladies walking around asking if anyone wants more. There is never a shortage of food, you can get as much as you want. A menu is posted one day before and there are some old folks who do not like veggies or meat so they can write their name and there is alternate stuff for them. ALL THE FOOD IS PARSI STYLE, NUTRICIOUS, DELICIOUS AND PLENTY. There are 4 ladies in the kitchen to look after the preparation of meals. One day Dinsoo mentioned to one of the cooks that she would like to eat Bhelpuri, and a few days later we had Bhelpuri with three different chutneys for her.

The operation at the centre is a well-oiled machine. Every morning there are ladies (local workers) who come and sweep and mop the rooms and wash clothes. They help with bathing and make hot water for shower for those who do not have geyser in their rooms. We were happy there and enjoying our stay.  

NOW LET’S TALK ABOUT NAVSARI AS I KNOW IT. Some of the information has been gleaned from the 1st Dasturji Meherji Rana Library.

Earlier Parsis had been living all along the west coast of India mainly in the area of Gujarat. There are two distinct towns that have a long history of being Parsi strongholds. One is Surat and the other is Navsari. This place was called nagmandal

(Snake pit, house of snake) but it seems that some Parsis thought that it looked more like Sari in Iran and they named it Nav  Sari.

Navsari was considered to be the stronghold of Parsidom. Even now there are many Parsi institutions here but sadly very few Parsis to take advantage of the facilities. Some of the most famous Parsis were from Navsari and in the past those who were not from Navsari came here to pay homage to the heart of Parsidom.  Three of the most recent outstanding Parsis are Jamshetji N. Tata, Dadbhoy Navroji and of course the greatest philanthropist of all times Sir Jamshetji Jeejebhoy.

These three were not just for Parsis but for the country- India’s first PM Nehru has known to have said that Jamshetji Tata was a one man planning commission for India. Navsari is also considered to be the Dharm ni Takdi (Top of the hill or Seat or pillar of our religion). His holiness Meherji Rana. represented Parsis at the court of Emperor Akbar. 

Navsari has the oldest Daremehr in India called Vadi Daremeher, which is well over 875 years old. There have been more Navars, Martabs performed at Vadi Daremehr than at any other place. Vadi Daremeher is considered to be akin to Harvard or Stanford of Parsi priests. (I believe you can only do a Sampurno mobed from here. Navsari was also the home of Iranshah for three hundred years. Navsari’s Atash Bahram is considered to be the 2^nd holiest place for Parsis after Udvada. It is also set in a nicer setting than many other agairies and Atash Baharams. It is located in an area called Tarota).

Navsari was estimated to have had a Parsi population of 30,000+ but like all other Parsi population it is declining and is now estimated to be approx. 2,500. Presently a lot of Parsis live in an area called Ava Baugh. There is an old Ava Baugh and a new Ava Baugh. Ava Baugh was built by late Mr. Shapurji Jokhi. Shapurji Jokhi was a modern day philanthropist whose life  story runs almost similar to Sir Jamshetji Jeejibhoy. He was born in Navsari in a poor family and made his money thru hard work and business in Hong Kong, China.  As the population has declined so have the Parsi houses. They are either sold out to non-community members or some of them lying in total decay. The old city streets are called Mohalla (street). A lot of Mohallas have Parsi names. Vacha, Antiawad (Most Antias Lived on that street) Dasturwad, Kanga street, Dudha Mohalla, Damaka Mohalla, Pinjar Mohalla, etc.

There may be many hospitals in Navsari but there are two that are known to all and sundry in Navsari. One is D. N. Mehta Sarvajanik Hospital which is locally known as Parsi hospital and the other is Daboo Hosp.  The D. N. Mehta Hospital used to be earlier known as Parsi Suvavad khanu (maternity hospital). It is now a full fledged hospital. I have yet to remember a town where we  have visited and Dinsoo has not been interned in one of the hosp. She did not make an exception for Navsari.

There are many well known Parsis from Navsari both from Yore and new. Everyone knows about Meherji Rana who was invited to Emperor Akbar’s court. Another great person and sometimes considered as the savior of our faith was a man called Changasha. Changasha was a Desai, (Desai is like a mini king in a kingdom). He was very religious and very orthodox Parsi and was troubled by the fact that many Parsis in the villages and small towns had taken on Hindu customs, names, names like Jaloo, Dhunmai, Mani, etc. and followed Hindu practices. Almost all the rituals performed before the Parsi wedding are all Hindu. He held Mehfils – conferences and gave them sudreh and kusti. One person by the name Nariman Hoshang from Baruch had come to the Mehfils and Changasha deputed him to go to Kerman in Iran and other religious places in Iran and have discourses with the learned Dasturs and bring back information and religious practices. These practice of interchange continued for over 300years and are now popularly known has Revayats. Another achievement of his was to bring the holy Iranshah to Navsari from Vasanda where it stayed in Navsari for 300 years. He also settled Parsis in an area of Navsari which is now called Malesar. Chagsha name is recited in our prayers with other great Dasturs and scholars.  He had a son called Manecksha. Manecksha was called Raja probably the first Parsi Raja in India. Manecksha built the first Stone Dokhama in Navsari. There were many learned scholars from Navsari, to name a few, Dastur Darab Pallon, Dastur Jamspa Asa, Dasturan-Dastur Darabji Mahiarji Meherji Rana, Dastur Farmroze Kutar and his brother Dastur Kaikhushru Mahair Kutar of Dastur Darab Pahlon family. Dastur Kaikhushru Kutar was a scholar and use to recite and sing the Shah-Nameh at Dadar Rustom Farmana Agairy after his lectures on religion and stories from the Shah-Nameh. (My brother Jamshed and I never missed his lectures and singing of the Shah-nameh. He also held religious classes at Wadia Vacha High School in Dadar). Navsari has produced many other Dasturs and scholars. This is probably why it is called Dharm ni Tekri. A little known fact is that a Parsi by the name of Rustom Maneck Sett of Surat went to Aurangzeb’s (Aurangzeb was the son of Shah Jahan) court to plead for rights for the British to trade on the west coast. Why is this important? Because, if they were refused then the History of India or Mumbai for sure would be different.

Two well-known Parsis of today’s Navsari: one is Hormazd Avari who is a horse breeder and has a stable of 16 to 20 horses, this stable is kitty corner from Pinjar Mohalla. (Pinjara – a person who takes an old mattress which has flattened out and hardened working with an instrument like a bow fluffs up the cotton and it becomes like new) When I was young we use to get our mattresses done once a year or more. It is a lost art. The other well known Paris is Dara Daboo who has his hand in everything you want to do in Parsidom in Navsari. Both Hormazd and Dara do Navjotes of poor Parsi children and sponsor wedding functions each year on 21st March.

There is one more person who is a silent worker and does a lot of social and community work, both in Navsari and Mumbai; he goes to the remote villages of South Gujarat to help the helpless and needy. He is none other than Dinshaw Tamboly. You name it and Dinshaw has been there. I say that Bachi & Dinshaw do God’s work. I had the good fortune of meeting him some time in the 1990s when we lived in England. He had come for a meeting of WZO.

I will begin my monologue with modern day Navsari as I see it. The following are my comments and mine alone.

A few days ago early in the morning before 7:00am I was sitting on the aganiu (A small stretch of landing before entering the main door of the house) when I see and hear a Parsi shouting the name of a person that Mr. so and so had passed away this morning and relationships and then saying the Paidust will be this afternoon and the Uthamna will be tomorrow at the MinocherHomji Daremeher. Coincidently this happened again the next day so I got curious and asked the manager if this is normal. I thought that he was making an announcement since the person deceased in the morning. Today announcement was for someone who passed away yesterday. He told me that he had lived here all his life and this has been a normal practice ever since he remembers. He goes from Mohalla to Mohalla where Parsis have homes. This reminded me of the town crier when we lived in Sunningdale, England. Question in my mind did we (Parsis) copy them or they (British) copied us. Or is this totally coincidental?

Every mid-morning a whistle blows (Like the ones that train guards of my days used) and a garbage truck similar to the one we have in the US but of a smaller size arrives. A man walking on the side as the truck rolls by blows the whistle and folks living on upper level in the houses lower a basket containing a small package of garbage and the man picks it up. There is a large Plastic bag hanging from the back of the truck and that is for recycling materials.

One very good practice here is (like what I had seen in Southern Europe and South America) that there are no street sweepers, every house cleans up to half the street in front of their house first sweeping and then throwing water. I believe water solely for the purpose of keeping the dust down. Remember there is no water from the heavens before or after the monsoon.

There are no side-walks (foot paths) so naturally everyone walking shares the road with the traffic. Most of the traffic is 2 wheelers (mostly scooters) and Auto-rickshaw. In all my roaming around Malesar there are two small stretches of sidewalks and guess what, like everywhere in India there are cars parked on the sidewalk. I believe this is mainly due to lack of infra-structure the traffic has picked up but the govt. is way behind. I think our New PM Na Mo will change it. Hope so!

Speaking about two wheelers, when we first came some longtime residents saw me wheeling Dinsoo out. When they saw me they said watch out for Kids on the scooters, so I said Kids! Yes there are 12 to 14 year olds who ride them like maniacs I was skeptical said okay a few days later I was standing at my room window and guess what this young girl across the street getting on a scooter in the morning with a back pack on her shoulder driving away. I doubt even if she is 12 years old but then I am not sure how old because most Gujaratis are rather short.

There are two lakes in the city limits one is called Dudhyo (Milky) taloa and this particular lake supplies water to Navsari. The other lake is called Sherbetia taloa, this talo gets all the dirty water from most of Navsari.  A well-known place in Navsari is Lunsiqui. This is a big open garden where people come and sit in the evening to relax. I am told that at one time it use to be a nice place (posh) with single family bungalows all around. Now it is surrounded by tall buildings both commercial and residential. We are located in an area called Junathana (old jail house) which is a part of Malesar or adjacent to Malesar. I am told that it is called Malesar as Sir J J use to meet people in this area. People use to come to meet Sir J J hemce the name Male-sar. (Sir is Sir JJ)

One evening while Dinsoo and I were out on our walk in Malesar on Vadi Mohalla I saw through the window a big pile of diamonds on a table with men and women using some kind of a device to grind them. So out of curiousity I asked if I can come in to see what they are doing. They were holding a tool like a door handle and kind of grinding it on a disc sander. (It looked like a sander but it is something different – I cannot explain) This is what Hira gasu is and these are people who are called Hiragasu (Diamond grinders). I asked who are these for I was told some a very little portion for Jewelers in India and most for foreign. (Do not forget Surat is the 2^nd largest diamond center on our planet after Anthwerpen).

There is a place called Tata Baugh. This is where Mr. J. N. Tata had mango trees planted from each state of the country. He loved mangoes. There is a type of mango that is called barmasa – 12 months. This tree gives mangoes 12 months of the year. There are a couple of rest houses inside the baugh and these are for Tata company officers who come here for rest and recreation.

There are a lot of strange business combinations like optician+perfume store. Lot of businesses have names such Ram’s sweets and dairy. The one that I find interesting is “GODS” mobile store. Incidentally he is a Parsi and I get my Internet and Mobile phone from him. They are very nice people. If anyone has a mobile phone problem please call God for help! “The biGer bUrGerrr” this store has pictures of burgers like the “BIG MAC”, “Whopper”, and a “hamburger”. There is a store called KOLA G. As most of us know there is a famous Parsi business selling pickles, ice cream, strong vinegar, pickles, etc is called KOLAHJI. This store sells COLA made in a soda machine (carbonated water making machine with flavor of your choice. He is located at the junction of Junathana and Panch Hateri. (Panch Hateri means 5 markets). This is a major intersection in Navsari after you leave the Highway N-8 that goes  from Mumbai to Delhi. Incidentally it takes approx. 3and1/2 hours to come to Navsari from Dadar, Mumbai by road- a total distance of 251KM (approx. 157 miles)

Since 16th December 2015, the days have been a little chilly. The temp. is 16C or 60.8F for my non-European friends. Both the elderly residents and the people on the street have monkey caps, Sweaters, some of the ladies wear long johns or Pyjamas under their gowen. For my younger friends not used to Gujerati a Gown is a gowen – usually a night gown.

Before I end this monologue I would like to thank Bachi and Dinshaw Tamboly for their help in making all the necessary arrangements for Dinsoo’s funerary services both with the local agairy, holding Dinsoo’s body at the local hospital mortuary till the paidust as we were waiting for my daughter Jehan to arrive to do the sachkar for her mom. I would be most ungrateful if I did not thank the WZO SCC staff. The administrator, managers and the entire staff went into action to help my family and me.

In ending I must mention that Dinsoo was so happy residing at the WZO Trust Funds Senior Citizens Centre that she asked me “Dara can Dinshaw let us live here for the rest of our lives?”. At least for my dear Dinsoo, her wish of spending her final days in peace and happiness was fulfilled.

The post Dara Rivetna: My Sojourn At Navsari appeared on Parsi Khabar.

This is the story of our hero and our father Framroze R. Bhandara, who served with pride in the British Navy during World War II. He was born in Mumbai into a middle class Zoroastrian priestly family to Tehmina and Rustomji Bhandara. The purpose of writing this article is to motivate our Zoroastrian youth to join the armed services, be it the Army, Navy, or Air force.

Being the elder daughter, I had the good fortune of listening to my father’s adventurous stories and was completely fascinated by the diversified cultures of various islands in UK, which he had visited. The dance and costumes that he described greatly amused me. When I grew older and came across the same in school, I realized that much of what he shared was true and that I was already aware of that. Summarizing all the stories and viewing his medals, trophies and documents, made me and my little twin brothers Zarrir & Cherag feel very proud to have him as our father. He was truly a hero to us.

Fali, as he was fondly called was a young lad of 19, who after completing his matriculation, was contemplating his future, when a signboard that read: “JOIN THE NAVY AND SEE THE WORLD” got his attention. During that period, India was ruled by the British, and World War II had already started. After training he was sent to Rangoon – Burma, a jungle-like territory. While he and his comrades were there, they sometimes had nothing to eat, and, were compelled to roast and eat a dead horse to survive. Later on he was transferred to the southern region in India (I cannot recollect the specific geographical location) and from there he was positioned on a war ship as the Leading Gunner. As per his documents the year was 1940, and this was the first warship with an all Indian crew sailing towards Great Britain.

Midway through his journey, Nazi forces started bombing the British ship, by attacking the British soldiers through air strikes. The Nazi war plane swooped low on Fali’s ship and an active battle took place. Fali valiantly fired rounds at the Nazi war planes, forcing the Nazis to flee, leaving the ship he was on, unharmed. Now at a matured age, I am beginning to grasp the level of stress and determination & realize what it really must have been like, to be in the line of fire continuously, and I am amazed by the skill, judgment, fearlessness and vigilance my father had exhibited at that young age of 19. He was in England, Belfast, Dublin and Glasgow from 1940 to 1949, on active duty, serving the Royal Indian Navy.

In one of the aerial strikes on the British Isles, he was injured whilst saving a comrade’s life. He was shot in his forearm and the elbow, and he would proudly show the scar to us as his trophy for saving a life.

Since he was positioned in the British Isles for Naval warfare, the essential parts of his duties included war submarines and under water diving, in which he excelled.

After the war he continued and returned to India for good in the fifties, with war stars and medals. He was released as a Class “A” officer.

Along with the exciting adventures, there was tragic sadness and rage when fellow soldiers dropped dead and sometimes there would be strong fights amongst the Indians themselves, which was like the law of jungle. These searing emotions made him to become very stern in nature.

Fali was a very humble man, never ever boasting or telling anybody, except his children, about his life in the UK. He followed a simple lifestyle, upon first glance one would never imagine that he had spent twelve exciting, adventurous years in Great Britain, while defending his country. Furthermore, he knew some tap dancing and waltz, but at heart he was an Indian and a simple Bawaji, who loved his Parsi food.

Later on he joined the Municipal Corporation and worked in the water department for 30 years. He married a Parsi lady Khorshed from the entrepreneurial Writer family, and had three children (Hira, Zarrir & Cherag) and passed on to his spiritual journey at the age of 69.

Unfortunately, much of the noble and brave deeds of brave young Indian militia have gone unnoticed, because they were not descriptively documented by the British, in the heat of war.

Our salute to you oh Father Fali,

“The drums may not beat, the sirens may not blow, but

Our love for you will remain forever.”

Scans of documents & medals attached.

The above article was written by Hira, Zarrir, and Cherag Bhandara and forwarded to us by Meher Amalsad

The post Framroze R. Bhandara: A World War II Parsi Hero appeared on Parsi Khabar.

Theatre actor Jim Sarbh marks his debut on the silver screen with Ram Madhvani’s biopic on airhostess Neerja Bhanot.

Ankita Maneck | Scroll

Named as one of Forbes magazine’s 30 under 30 people to watch in 2015, Jim Sarbh is going places. The theatre actor makes his debut in the movies in Neerja. Ram Madhvani’s biopic, which will be in cinemas on February 19, is based on the true story of the courageous flight attendant who saved the lives of 359 people when Pan Am Flight 73 was hijacked in Karachi in 1986. Sarbh plays one of the Palestinian terrorists who slaughters innocents, including Bhanot (Sonam Kapoor). He has a blink-and-miss appearance in the trailer, but we are sure we will see more of him in the movie.

Sarbh is from one of the most respected families in the art world – he is the grandson of Kali Pundole, who started the Pundole Art Gallery in 1963 in Mumbai. Sarbh fell in love with theatre at the age of 12 after he performed in a production of Romeo and Juliet. He further honed his craft at Emory University in Atlanta, where he decided he wanted to act professionally.

In the few years that he has been in India, Sarbh has made his mark on the Mumbai stage in such plays as Alyque Padamsee’s production of Death of a Salesman and Sunil Shanbag’s Stories in a Song. Sarbh has also directed Bull, an adaptation of Mike Bartlett’s play about office politics. He is translating French dramatist Jean Genet’s The Maids from French into Hindi in order to direct a local version of the celebrated study of power relations.

Sarbh has worked in Kalki Kochein’s The Living Room, for which he received good notices. One of his more recent stage roles was as Gratiano in Vickram Kapadia’s The Merchant of Venice.

Sarbh has also dabbled in online short films such as The Art of Crying, in which he tries to learn voice modulation from roadside vendors.

And he has voiced MTV’s short web series Indiepedia.

He has appeared in the Rajasthan Tourism advertisement Bike.

Here’s the man who terrorises Sonam in Neerja and he isn’t As bad As you think!

Interview by Shilpa Dubey | PINKVILLA

Even in a movie like Neerja, based on the life of a feisty young woman who sacrificed her life for others during a plane hijack, theatre actor Jim Sarbh shines out bright. His acting prowess and eyes for detail made his character Khaleel in the film look like a real badass guy. The 27-year-old Parsi lad wore the skin of a Palestine terrorist so cleverly that it makes you cringe in your seat every time he appears on the screen.

Jim has earned his share of fame in the theatre world. But, not many know that he belongs to one of the most respected art family in India. Love for art, culture and cinema flows in the veins of the grandson of Kali Pundole, who started the Pundole Art Gallery in 1963 in Mumbai.

Sarbh had his first tryst with theatre when he was 12 after he played a part in a production of Romeo and Juliet. But it was his days at Emory University in Atlanta when he had decided to take up acting as a profession.

The 27-year-old actor has marked his presence in plays like Alyque Padamsee’s Death of a Salesman and Sunil Shanbag’s Stories in a Song, Vickram Kapadia’s The Merchant of Venice, Mike Bartlett’s Cock and many others.  However, Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie and Kalki Koechlin’s The Living Room earned him special attention from the film fraternity.

In a candid conversation, Jim gets chatty about the film Neerja, his role and other details of his life.

You have made quite an impact with your debut movie. Share your experiences about being a part of Neerja with us.

I am feeling very good. Neerja is such a solid film. Everything about the film has substance, be it sound, background scores, or direction. The film completely stands out. The tight script was so appealing and the way each page of the story emerges on screen is great. Everybody’s performance is pretty solid. And to be part of something like this is a great experience in its own

How did Neerja happen to you? Tell us about your journey from theatre stage to silver screen.

I was abroad for the play The Merchants of Venice and Kanika Berry, the casting director of the film, kept trying to call me. Somehow, she wasn’t getting through. Finally, I got one of her messages. Then, I called her back and told her that I’ll be in Mumbai soon for two-three days and then I have to go back for my play. We agreed upon a date and time.

When I came and met them, they didn’t have a scene for me. They wanted me to improvise a hijacker, who is clueless, nervous, tries to scare people because he is afraid. And, that’s what I was trying to do in the audition. Then, I met Vinod Rawat, the director’s assistant. He was taking actor’s workshops. We had a long chat and improvisations, where he told me to be the boss.

So you came here for another role?

No! Actually, when I came here I didn’t know much about the project. I hadn’t read the scripts. In the workshop, there was one girl with us, who was one of the assistant directors. They asked me to make her sing a song. I went to that full on and after watching that moment, Vinod decided to give me Khaleel’s role. Later, when I read the script, I was like wow. This is something. Khaleel was the most exciting part to do. His character had a lot of things in it.

You haven’t really spent much time in India. So, how did you manage Hindi dialogues?

They were basically nervous about my Hindi. So, I did a few scenes in Hindi for them and put a little bit of accent I could. Then I was included in the workshop, where there were three of us — Abrar, the leader, Ali and I were kept for the roles of Mansoor and Farhad- the younger hijackers.

How has been your acting journey been so far?

I have been active in acting from my school and college days. I have acted in Atlanta for one year. I have done one or two plays in New York briefly. Then I decided to call it quit as I had started believing that acting is narcissistic. It occurred to me then that nobody really cares about what an actor does or feel about it. For one year I quit and I went to an ashram in Bihar and went to Himalayas backpacking. I visited Gangotri and Himachal. Amidst this wanderlust, I started feeling what I am doing with my life. Is this what I want and other things. How long should I do this? Then I realised that I have to make films or act in the films and if I didn’t do that I’ll always regret it.

When are we going to see you next on the silver screen?

Right now, I am working in Konkona Sen Sharma’s directorial venture. My character is of an Anglo-Indian guy called Brian and I cannot talk more about it. There’s another movie in the pipeline, which will be produced by Anurag Kashyap.It is titled as Three And A Half Take. I have been getting a variety of roles. So, I think it’s all good.

Tell us about working with Sonam Kapoor.

It was great working with her. But, you wouldn’t believe that during our shoot, we didn’t interact at all. And for our roles, I think that was very good. All the hijackers were kept separately and we didn’t interact with Sonam or other passengers or another cast. I didn’t want to make friends with everyone and do small talks, as the next moment I had to terrorise them. So, I think it worked well for us. It was better to have the air of mysteries in such cases and I really enjoyed that.

You sound nothing like your character in the movie. It seems you have undergone great diction training. Tell us about other preparations for the role.

It was our workshop that really threw us into our characters. We also did Arabic and combat training for the film. Vinod would make us sit in the hot seat and there would be all kind of questions by our tribunal afterwards. He would ask us questions like why Khaleel did this or that, what was going on in his head and things like this which helped us get into the character’s skin well. In theatre, I get comedy or nice lead roles. I don’t understand a grey or negative role. You do it great or badly. That’s all to it.

Debuting in Bollywood with a negative role is a big deal in this industry. Aren’t you afraid of people’s reaction?

I thought of it as a role. If it wasn’t for a hijacker and the movie was about a bank robber, I would have done it. It was tricky. The entire Islamic world is going through such a bad phase. I do not want to be another drop in the ocean of anti-Islamics segment. I didn’t want to do much of ‘Allahu-Akbar’ and ‘Masha Allah’. I didn’t want to appear heavy-religious overtone and Vinod would listen to our concerns and suggestions.

How do you see Khaleel from an actor’s eyes?

For Khaleel, the whole world is a gang-warfare and we are at the bottom. And in a gang, if you have to rise you have to be ready to do what it takes. He is like an animal and an animal doesn’t like getting hurt. We saw things happening very quickly and he was very smart. He was nervous and wanted to live his life. He was the street-fighter kind, who doesn’t care about the fair way of fighting. He would take the easiest and quickest way to get to his goals.

Small talk with Jim Sarbh

Jim Sarbh on how art is hardwired in his brain and why words matter in theatre

A framed poster of MF Husain’s work signed by the late modern artist (‘To the aspiring actor Jim’) sits in Jim Sarbh’s room at the family’s Malabar Hill home, along with two other paintings by the artist. “He’s my favourite,” Sarbh smiles.

You can tell the 26-year-old grandson of gallerist Kali Pundole, who has grown up around rare artworks by Ram Kumar, Prabhakar Kolte and S H Raza, knows his art when he narrates this anecdote: “Once, I walked into someone’s home, and yelped, ‘How can you let this beautiful Prabha painting get this dirty?’. They didn’t even know (it was a B Prabha). But it’s all hardwired in my brain.”

Sarbh, however, found his calling in theatre. Currently busy rehearsing for Rajit Kapur’s version of Tennessee Williams’ melancholic family drama, The Glass Menagerie, he is excited at the thought of playing Tom Wingfield. “It’s my first as lead, and that too opposite a stalwart like Shernaz (Patel),” he shares.

Settling into a chair that sits on a balcony adjoining his room, he asks if the kohl he lined his eyes with the night before for a mock shoot, remains. “Atul (Kumar) is trying to do an experimental project loosely based on Cabaret. I was painted half-pink, halfgold, and was walking around Bandra for the shoot,” he says, adding, “how do you people (women, we presume) remove make-up? It’s so tedious.”

Although Sarbh studied psychology at Emory University in Atlanta, he’d fit in play rehearsals into his evenings. “The school would stage plays along with professional actors and directors. I’d do as many as I could. So, how much psychology I really ended up studying, I don’t know.”

While there, he took up a course on direction with Susan Booth (artistic director of the Tony-award winning Alliance Theatre group). “I’m not sure why I did well. Was it because I followed her after class sometimes, walking her to the car while chatting about ideas, that she gave me a job in her theatre after I graduated?” he says.

Three years ago the American accented English-speaking Parsi returned to Mumbai to pursue theatre full-time. The first role he bagged in 2012 was that of a foreigner. It was for Purva Naresh’s Ok Tata, Bye, Bye, and won him his next part in Sunil Shanbag’s Stories in a Song, “because they needed an American guy”. “I was afraid that I’d be typecast as the token firang,” he laughs. “That happened initially. Now, I am acting in Noises Off and Menagerie where all of us are playing British and American characters. That makes me feel better.”

The play that he has truly enjoyed working on was Gates to India Song. Ironically, it didn’t receive a particularly positive reception in the city. “Friends walked out halfway through the show. But what I loved was that we didn’t have to do anything apart from making the words sing — allow the text to flow through us and do whatever it did to us,” he reflects.

On stage, each word needs to be weighed, Sarbh insists. He draws an example from Mike Bartlett’s Cock, which he’s currently acting in and directing. “There’s this line where a woman asks my character (who has only been with men most of his life) ‘your place or mine?’, and my character, who has just broken up with his boyfriend of seven years and is sleeping on a friend’s couch, replies, ‘I don’t have a place. I mean, my place is his… I mean, I am on the couch, with a friend, so we can’t go there’. If you follow the punctuations, you’ve got each idea one after the other,” he says, enacting the scene.

Next, Sarbh plans to direct a play with young artists designing the set and costumes. There is also a children’s play in the offing, along with his ongoing shows. So, is theatre a viable career option? “Not at all,” he says. “You have to do all kinds of things like voice-overs, corporate gigs, and edit videos to support yourself. When my uncle (Kali’s son Dadiba) holds an auction, I go and help him out, too.”

What he is waiting to do, is “to get in to a gallery and curate a performance art show,” thus marrying both his passions.

The post Jim Sarbh: The Parsi who plays a stellar role in Bollywood Blockbuster Neerja appeared on Parsi Khabar.

The three stages of black hole collision as observed in supercomputer simulation of Einstein Equations. C V Vishveshwara from the Raman Research Institute, along with S. Chandrasekhar (Nobel Prize, 1983) did the historic work in understanding of the “ringdown” stage after collision of black holes (Simulation and Image Credit: K. Jani, M. Clark, M. Kinsey, Center For Relativistic Astrophysics , Georgia Institute of Technology)

Article by Karan Pankaj Jani  | Huffington Post

On the morning of 11 February, when the executive director of the gravitational wave experiment LIGO, David Rietze, announced the greatest scientific discovery of the century — the first detection of gravitational waves — at the National Press Club in Washington DC, there was one Indian at the front row, who carried with him the legacy of Indian science. Bala R Iyer, a senior professor from Bangalore and chair of the Indian Initiative in Gravitational-Wave Observation (IndIGO), has spent decades of his research in modelling the gravitational waves from a pair of black holes, similar to the one we detected on 14 September, 2015. The observed gravitational waves from black hole collision is such a landmark feat that future historians will mark this as a transition much like BC to AD in mankind’s understanding of the universe. And when a future Ramachandra Guha will discuss the role India played in this discovery, the first scientist’s name to emerge in the list should not surprise any Indian.

Exactly 77 years ago before this historical announcement, an emerging young Indian physicist at Cambridge, who had already marked his place in the international arena of quantum physics, decided to come back to his hometown, Bombay. At a time when all other important Indians were occupied with freedom struggle, this man came to Swadesh with an aspiration of starting a fundamental physics research centre. Modern India owes big thanks to this man, Homi Jehangir Bhabha, for making that bold career move, because of which India has been part of every historical scientific feat in the last 50 years — from the first independent test of the nuclear bomb, to the first success on Mars, and now with the future of astrophysics relying very crucially in the hands of LIGO India project.

Bhabha was rather like Rancho of 3 Idiots. Belonging to an influential Parsi family closely related to the Tatas, he was set to pursue metallurgy and lead the Tata Steel Mills at Jamshedpur. Instead, like a classic rebel, he went on to study cosmic rays at the iconic Cavendish Laboratory in the University of Cambridge and computed the interaction between electron and its antimatter (positron), which in his honour is named as the ‘Bhabha Scattering’. At Cambridge, Bhabha interacted with emerging legends of physics like Niels Bohr, Paul Dirac and Enrico Fermi. It is said he was well aware of the Manhattan Nuclear Bomb project by noticing a sudden absence in the scientific publications of his fellow physics buddies. When Bhabha returned to India in 1939, he soon became a close ally of emerging Congress Party leader, Jawaharlal Nehru. For Nehru, Bhabha proved to be his intellectual soul mate. Unlike any other leader or scientist of the time, Bhabha had the vision and technical skill to develop an ambitious nuclear program that was required to preserve the sovereignty of independent India. And with Nehru at the helm of affairs post-independence, Bhabha had a free hand to chart the path for modern India’s role in science and technology.

One of the first research centres that Bhabha set up was the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) in 1945. To persuade the Sir Dorabji Jamsetji Tata Trust to fund this institute, Bhabha wrote an aggressive letter, in which castigated the mediocre applied research institutes that were wasting the scientific talent in the country. Instead he proposed a dedicated institute where research in physics and fundamental sciences could lead a national movement of science and technology towards national security and industrial applications. In a mark of an ingenious visionary, he wrote in the letter:

“It is neither possible nor desirable to separate nuclear physics from cosmic rays since the two are closely connected theoretically.”

Homi Jehangir Bhabha, father of the Indian Nuclear Programme (Image Credit: Homi Bhabha Fellowship)

(L-R) Albert Einstein, Hideki Yukawa, John Wheeler (the one who coined the word ‘black hole’) and Homi Bhabha at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton (Image Credit: Princeton University)

Over the last 70 years, TIFR, where Bhabha served as the founding director, has nurtured world class researchers in the field of Einsteinian relativity. In 2007, TIFR opened a new campus in Bangalore — the International Centre for Theoretical Sciences — where the chair of IndIGO consortium, Bala Iyer is leading the effort for the LIGO-India project. The legendary Indian cosmologist Jayant Narlikar (Padma Vibhushan) started his career at TIFR and later formed the Inter University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA) in Pune in 1988. The team at IUCAA, led by one of the leaders in space-based gravitational-wave experiments, Sanjeev Dhurandhar, will lead the gravitational-wave data-analysis effort for the proposed LIGO-India project. LIGO-India, the third of the LIGO detectors (currently one is in Louisiana and the other in Washington, USA), is a mega science project in collaboration with the United States to build and operate a gravitational-wave detector on India soil, like the one that detected the first gravitational waves.

As the director also of the Atomic Energy Commission of India, Bhabha formed the Atomic Research Centre (named in his honour as Bhabha Atomic Research Centre; BARC) for peaceful, use of nuclear technology. BARC channelized the formation of the Raja Ramanna Centre for Advanced Technology (RRCAT) at Indore in 1984. The advance lasers and quantum optics that are crucial to maintain sensitivity of the LIGO-India experiment will be lead by scientists at RRCAT. In 1986, the Institute for Plasma Research (IPR) in Gandhinagar was set up by the governing council of BARC. The scientists at IPR will lead the ambitious effort of building 16sq km of vacuum chambers that will form the L-shaped interferometer path for the LIGO-India experiment.

When Bhabha led the Scientific Advisory Committee for the Government of India, he initiated plans for ambitious space programme in 1962, which later evolved as the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) and the formation of Department of Space. These organizations, along with Department of Atomic Energy and Department of Science & Technology, have remained central funding agencies for astrophysics and fundamental science research in India. Bhabha’s legacy in 21st century India is well captured in the LIGO detection paper, “Observation of Gravitational Waves from a Binary Black Hole Merger”, which has over 30 Indian researchers. The LIGO scientific collaboration gratefully acknowledges the role of these Indian funding agencies, which Bhabha charted within just 25 years of his active role in India. This detection paper will be cited by every scientific publication in the field of astrophysics and Einstein’s Relativity for at least the next 50 years.

Among the most critical contributions of Bhabha to modern India and the new era of gravitational-wave science in our country is the inclusion of the term “scientific temper” in our Constitution. India is only the country that places constitutional values in scientific logic and rationality. It is believed that Bhabha convinced Nehru and Ambedkar to add “scientific temper” as one of the fundamental duties.

At time when we Indians are participating in the greatest scientific feats by mankind, we are also being fooled by pseudo- and anti-science practices that are rampant in every corner of this nation. It is a sad state when miracle-making godmen, astrologers, vastu-shastra, and hoax medical products get more income revenue from our citizens than the total science budget of institutes like IUCAA. The acknowledgement to the Indian scientist by Prime Minister Modi on the day of the announcement of the gravitational-wave detection thus and today a historic announcement for approval of LIGO-India project set the right tone on the priorities of our scientific nation in the making. And if we want to Make in India, and Discover in India, then without any dilution, we should work towards promoting a “scientific temper” in India. It is only then we carry forward Homi Bhabha’s legacy for India in the science of tomorrow.

The post Why We Need To Thank Homi Bhabha for India’s Role In The Discovery of Gravitational Waves appeared on Parsi Khabar.

Article on Filmfare.com

He’s one of the best things about Rohit Shetty’s Dilwale. Tell Boman that and he beams. He reveals what’s unique about working in a Rohit Shetty movie. “Generally, you interact with the cinematographer, the director or the first assistant director while shooting but this unit has a whole army of spot boys, assistant directors and production guys. And each and everyone has an individual personality… a voice. And they have been on several journeys with Rohit before. That’s why in the credits it always reads ‘Rohit Shetty and team’.”

Dilwale is not the only successful venture Boman has had with Shah Rukh Khan. The pair have worked in hits like Don: The Chase Begins Again, Don 2: The King is Back, Happy New Year and Main Hoon Na before. “Nothing has changed in the last 11 years since Main Hoon Na. Whether he’s the actor or the producer, Shah Rukh’s concerned about every unit member’s well-being. His door is always open. His private time begins when everyone leaves the room, which is at 4 am in the morning. He uses that moment to read or to make phone calls to his kids who live in England. He’s always in touch with his daughter Suhana and son Aryan.” He adds, “SRK has an electric and fantastic energy in front of the camera. He’s never relaxed off it either. He’s always planning. He hates clubbing but he does that, just for the youngsters on the set. For Varun’s (Dhawan) and Kriti’s (Sanon) sake he’d say, ‘Let’s go party!’ even though that’s not his scene. He is quite the ‘let’s please everyone’ kind of person.”

Dilwale got the evergreen pair of SRK and Kajol together after five years. “People associate them as a great romantic pair but there’s more to it. The pauses, the exchanges, the unsaid things between them… it’s great to see how much is said in the unsaid. As an actor, to observe them performing is wonderful,” he smiles. “It seems like Kajol’s been here forever. It’s not just the camera that comes alive while focussing on her; she too lights up in front of the camera.”

Boman also has the much hyped Housefull 3 coming up. “It’s the same old Batuk Patel in a different situation. It’s about his three daughters and their three boyfriends. Plus, there’s Jackie Shroff’s character to deal with too. But he isn’t sleepwalking this time!” he jokes. Unlike Dilwale, Housefull 3 was a set full of pranksters. “You blink your eyes and there’s a prank bang in your face. No one is spared, including the directors Sajid-Farhad.” He goes on to share an interesting incident. “It was the last shot of the day. The girls (Nargis Fakhri, Jacqueline Fernandez and Lisa Haydon) were standing beside the swimming pool. The boys (Akshay Kumar, Riteish Deshmukh and Abhishek Bachchan) had to go up to the girls and kiss their hands in the scene. They held the girls’ hands and next thing we know, they were in the swimming pool yelling and screaming!”

He reveals Akshay was the biggest prankster of them all but adds he’s bowled over by the chiselled star’s discipline. “He wakes up every day at some awful hour, much before the sun rises, and does half an hour of exercise in the swimming pool. He has different gadgets to work with; he even walks in the pool wearing mild weights. He fools around, pranks around but when the shot is on he’s all there.”

He has worked with the young crop in both Dilwale and Housefull 3. Quiz him about whom he believes has a brighter future amongst Varun, Kriti, Nargis, Lisa and Jacqueline and he answers, “Varun has a great future. Being from a film family, he understands how a set works, how people work, how important it’s to be prepared and to get the shot correct. He’s an extremely affable and hardworking lad.”

Even though he made his debut in Bollywood at the age of 44, Boman says people shouldn’t see him as a role model for late bloomers. “If someone tells you, ‘Wait till 40 to be an actor,’ then that would be a bad move. Do it when your passion becomes an obsession. And you have to be decently good at it. I have more than one passion. I love photography, music and I write,” he shares. The transition from being a shopkeeper to a an advertising photographer to an actor was a long one. “I did a lot of photography for the Miss Indias. Shiamak Davar introduced me to theatre through Alyque Padamsee. That’s how I met Rahul Da Cunha, the director of the play I’m Not Bajirao. After that play, people started saying ‘this guy can act’. The transition from theatre to films was a natural progression of sorts.” Having worked in comedy, action and thrillers, Boman tells he doesn’t have a favourite genre. “As an actor, I’m merely playing human beings – it can be a happy human being, a sad one, a terrified one….”

He doesn’t like being labelled as a comic actor. “My role in Rajkumar Hirani’s 3 Idiots wasn’t comic.  Dr Viru Sahastrabuddhe was a dark character. Even in Being Cyrus, Bhoothnath Returns and Jolly LLB I’ve played shadowy characters.” The actor who has given many memorable performances says he’s terrible with compliments. “The best compliment I received so far was for my portrayal of the Sardarji (Vidya Balan’s father) in Lage Raho Munnabhai. A Sardarji went on to tell me, ‘For me you’re a Sardar. Now you’ve to convince me you’re a Parsi in real life by playing a Parsi in a movie’. ” He doesn’t believe in method acting. “Whatever technique you adopt is your method. You have to understand the soul of the film because it will be wrong to put a Rohit Shetty character in a Raju Hirani film.” He insists that he just follows the director’s vision within the parameters of the story. “I cannot portray the character I played in Dilwale in a Subhash Kapoor or a Dibakar Banerjee film. The actor is only fulfilling the director’s vision and the tone of the movie.”

The real Boman Irani is nothing like the characters that he has portrayed on screen. “In most films, I’ve played madcap characters or someone mean, nasty, dark and twisted. The role I played in Well Done Abba perhaps was the closest to me.” And what about Shirin Farhad Ki Toh Nikal Padi? “Oh please, I’m not such a lollipop! I’m married. I have two children (sons Danesh and Kayoze) and have enjoyed a wonderful romance with my wife Zenobia. I’m not a pale romantic who didn’t know how to kiss! Romance is the bravest thing to attempt when you’re unsure if the other person cares for you or not. It was wonderful to play such a character in Shirin Farhad.”

Unlike his onscreen portrayals, he reveals that the real Boman is a happy, positive person. “I don’t like controversy. I’m an outgoing person but at the same time I like being home with my family. I’m not good with too many hours of loneliness. Just an hour to gather my thoughts is enough for me. Then I need my loved ones around me”. An easygoing father, Boman has never insisted his sons take to acting. “I only give my unsolicited advice when it comes to being respectful, honest and decent. When it comes to their career, I encourage them to give it a shot, fail and not worry about the results.”

The post Boman Irani talks movies: In Conversation appeared on Parsi Khabar.

Showbiz Chicago Interviews: JEFF Award Nominee BEHZAD DABU

February 21st 2016

Showbiz Chicago Feature Editor Stacey Crawley catches up with 2015 JEFF Award Nominee Behzad Dabu, who returns to the Goodman Theatre in Thorton Wilders’ delightful classic farce The Matchmaker, where he takes on the role of Barnaby Tucker.

Interview by Stacey Crawley, showbizchicago.com

Behzad Dabu returns to the Goodman, where he previously appeared in Disgraced (also at Berkeley Repertory Theatre and Seattle Repertory Theatre) and A Christmas Carol. Chicago credits include Inana, Blood and Giftsand The History Boys (TimeLine Theatre Company); Samsara (Jeff Award nomination) and Disconnect (Victory Gardens Theater); Disgraced (American Theatre Company); Twelfth Night (First Folio Theatre);Holes (Adventure Stage Chicago) and We Live Here (Theatre Seven of Chicago). Film and television credits include Chicago P.D., You’re So Talented, King Rat and Imperfections. He is a member of The Chicago Inclusion Project and an associate artist with TimeLine Theatre Company. Mr. Dabu attended Columbia College Chicago and is represented by Paonessa Talent. Behzaddabu.com.

The Matchmaker appears in the Goodman’s 856-seat Albert Theatre, March 5 – April 10, 2016. Tickets ($25-$82, as well as a special $10 ticket price for students) go on sale Friday, January 22; visit GoodmanTheatre.org, call 312.443.3800 or purchase in person at the Box Office at 170 N. Dearborn. For images and bio information for the company, visit GoodmanTheatre.org/PressRoom. Ernst & Young LLP and Interactive Health are the Corporate Sponsor Partners.

(SC) What sort of person is going to love this show?

(BD) What’s great about this show is that it is the telling of a simple story with a larger message about class and identity, wrapped up in a farce that’s funny for everyone. So if someone is looking for two hours of escaping and laughing you’ll get that – but a message might sneak in as well.

(SC) Why did you want to be involved in this production?

I like when classic stories are used to further a discussion. Here we are in 2016, we’ve got a massive social movement and people are becoming more aware of that. This production is a light-hearted comedy that dives into furthering the public debate about society, class and the arts.

(SC) What’s going to surprise people about this show?

(BD) How relevant it is and the discussion it’s going to provoke. This is an ‘old time’ production and I think there’s an automatic reaction of this isn’t going to be relevant to today. But the approach this is taking is to ask about sexuality, race and class and this play deals with all of those.

(SC) Besides this show – what’s your favorite play?

(BD) I saw Ivan Von Hove’s “The View from the Bridge” on Broadway and it changed what I thought was possible in theater. Probably the best play I’ve ever seen.

(S)

(SC) When did you first perform?

(BD) I did a lot of high school theater and my professional career began with the 2009 production “The History Boys” with TimeLine Theatre Company where I am now a company member.

(SC) Is there anyone you look up to as an actor?

(BD) I’m a great fan of Philip Seymour Hoffman, Sean Penn and Daniel Day Lewis – but I really find inspiration in art and I read a lot. Social justice movements and random independent movies about topics places like Iran are also very inspiring as well. And music – definitely music! It’s unusual to see me without headphones on.

(SC) What type of music are you listening to?

(BD) Wow I am listening o so many people right now! Everything from Kendrick Lamar, and Kanye to Alt-J and Yanni.

(SC) What do you do when you’re not doing theater?

(BD) Right now it seems like all I do is theater (laughs). I’m auditioning, working out to take care of myself. I read and go to the movies. As I mentioned I’m a company member at TimeLine and I also work with the Chicago Inclusion Project which works to create equal and safe places in the arts for people of color, women, people with disabilities and members of the LGBTQ community.

(SC) Thank you and best of luck with the run!

(BD) Thanks for having me.

The post Behzad Dabu: In Conversation with Showbiz Chicago appeared on Parsi Khabar.

From Chicken Farchas to Patrani Machhi, Parsi cuisines come alive at Bawa Restaurant

Article on Nagpur Today

Nagpur: Nagpur has been long endorsing the rich aroma of Irani tea, albeit in rare availability. Why only Irani chai, even the longing for chicken farchas, patrani machhi and berry pulao has been high on the taste on Nagpur food lovers. Welcome to rich food heritage of Parsi community which has long been associated with its distinct culture and of course, a large platter of mouthwatering delicacies. There has been a good chunk of Parsis spread out in Nagpur but the city food lovers have been elusive of its rich taste for long! Now the newly opened Bawa Restaurant near old VCA stadium in Civil Lines in Sadar has stepped up to bring alive the tempting taste and rich aroma of genuine Parsi cuisines to please the senses of Nagpur food connoisseurs. For the beginners, ‘Bawa’ is a colloquially used term to address Parsi community, and hence the name!

Taste of Art
Well, not only food even the art at the restaurant is tasteful! As you step in you are greeted with the pictures of Field Marshal Manekshaw, the Parsi Cricket team, few inspiring messages, Parsi Pop singer, along with attractive pictures of many Parsi celebrities including Daisy Irani and more. The ambience that one gets to enjoy in the flat turned restaurant is unique and worth visiting. The lights at the patio and near the tables spread at the out-door is worth enjoying. If the ambience does not get to your liking, the mouth watering delicacies will certainly do.

The non-vegetarian mouth watering delicacies including chicken, mutton, egg and the different variety of vegetarian delicacies will certainly enhance your choice of liking of different food items.

Exploring the roots…
Three young guys decided to hit the roads with their main objective of starting a restaurant. While many youngsters would be embarrassed to stand on the foot-path and sell goodies, these youngsters not only stood boldly at one corner of the Traffic Park in Dharampeth and held a flash sale of Parsi delicacies of including Chicken Cutlets and Chicken Farchas.

Sharing their experience, young entrepreneurs Sudarshan Barai (a graduate in Business Administration) and Yohan Doongaji (former worker of his father’s Steel Wool manufacturing company) said that they never thought that it would such a hit that customers would want to get it backed and relish it at their place. It was then that they made arrangements to go and buy the readymade plastic and aluminium foil containers. Till they reached the spot, they did not even realize that they need a table to showcase their products. Then they took one on rent from a Bichayat Kendra. However, the servings were so tasteful that all their 32 Chicken Cutlets and Chicken Farchas were off the platter within 45 minutes on the first day. On second day they doubled the numbers which again got sold soon.

They had a small battery operated speaker on which they played good music which had the youth getting drawn to their stall. This flash sale of Parsi delicacies at Traffic Park lasted for 6-8 months. There were many customers who got hooked to their mouth watering delicacies. Well one would wonder who is behind their success. It was none other than the mother of Yohan Doongaji.

It was she who prepared these dishes and helped them. All she had were two helpers. However all was not a bed a roses as it appeared. The young entrepreneurs minced no words when they said that they did have their highs and lows, joys and disappointments. However, both have taken it on their stride which they call it a learning experience. They learnt many valuable insights especially about Business, Customers’ likings, the preferred taste or palate etc. They learnt one very vital concept of “what it takes to hang on-Patience”. They then went on to provide party orders with home-delivery on an order of minimum 10 people. Then came Bawa restaurant which was opened last year in November.

The gourmet’s delight
At Bawa, the Parsi food turns alive in full aroma, texture and of course the genuine taste. Where the taste of Dhan Saak (Mutton or Chicken served with Brown (Caramelized) Rice) instantly hit the taste buds, it also adheres to the norms of home cooked Parsi dish.Then there is Patrani Machhi, which is prepared in the classic Parsi fish preparation style by coating Pomfret fillets in coconut chutney, wrapped in banana leaves and steamed. Farchas are all time favorites of all Parsi food lovers. Parsee Chicken Farcha is often served as a starter or appetizer at festivities or wedding ceremonies in the community. Berry Pulao also known as Zereshk Polo Ba Morgh (Fragrant Rice with Iranian Berries Zirisht, Chicken and Saffron): The soft fluffy rice, the succulent meat and the Zirisht berries can make any mouth water incessantly over just the thought of it. The recipe is a closely guarded family secret and no amount of Googling will yield any result. The fragrant saffron rice bejeweled with bright yellow chicken pieces and red glistening Zirisht is a dish one must taste. Lagan Nu Custard or Wedding Custard is a traditional dessert which is part of every Parsi celebration menus. The dish is a creamy, sweet and caramelized, garnished with nuts and raisins. This fragrant baked custard can be a rich and indulgent treat too. One must most certainly taste this for dessert.

Breakfast options
The duo informed that they would be soon starting the breakfast menu, which too offers multiple choices. Akuri is a spicy scrambled egg dish made in Parsi style. Akuri is cooked until almost runny; the eggs are never overcooked. The main flavours are fried onions along with ginger, coriander, chopped chillis, and black pepper. Maska Bun / Paw is Bread or Bun cut and a heavy coating of butter is applied in the cut portion.

Cold Coffees, Iranian Chai (Tea) and many more watering dishes.

By Samuel Gunasekharan
Pics by Vinay Nimgade

The post Parsi Cuisine in Nagpur: BAWA Restaurant appeared on Parsi Khabar.