One indian dies of this disease every minute. Dr. Zarir Udwadia shares the story of the suffering of one patient diagnosed with Totally Drug Resistant -Tuberculosis (TDR-TB). And unfortunately,succumbing to it. His mission is to educate the masses about the difficulties and complexities of the treatment of drug resistant tuberculosis.

Dr Zarir F Udwadia is a Mumbai based chest physician. He has a special interest and expertise in drug resistant tuberculosis. About 7000 patients pass through his clinics annually.

He is a prolific researcher and has over 125 PubMed indexed publications and 3000 citations to his credit and is co-author of “Principles of Respiratory Medicine” published by Oxford International.

His recent publication of the first Indian patients with Totally Drug Resistant TB featured on the front pages of Wall Street Journal, Time magazine, the New York Times and on BBC, and served to galvanize great change in the community.

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at http://ted.com/tedx

Members of the Dar-e-Mehr Zoroastrian Temple in Pomona get ready for their new year celebration as they worry about the Trump travel ban

Report by Peter Carr/The Journal News

New City’s Marzie Jafari looks forward to an annual family ritual tied to her Zoroastrian faith: Every vernal equinox, she calls her family in Iran to wish them happy Persian New Year, or Norwuz.

Marzie Jafari, a trustee at the Dar-e-Mehr Zoroastrian Temple in Pomona March 22, 2017. (Photo: Peter Carr/The Journal News)

Before long, the conversation always turns to when they’ll see each other again.

But not this year.

“It comes to your mind that you’ll have some family gathering,” Jafari said. “But now, when you think about it, uh-oh, there’s this travel ban in the background. What is going to happen? Can we plan in advance for the summertime? We don’t know.”

This year, in that time when that phone conversation would have turned to the coming summer, there was silence on both ends of the phone.

“They didn’t want to say anything to upset me, I didn’t want to say anything to upset them,” Jafari said, her voice catching the slightest bit. “So we didn’t talk about a near-future gathering.”

President Donald Trump has signed two executive orders banning travel from predominantly Muslim nations, including Iran, where Jafari’s family still lives.

“They have stopped taking appointments for visas,” Jafari said.

Her niece, a top student at the University of Tehran, had an internship in the States last summer. This year, Bahar — her name means “spring” — missed the deadline to apply for another internship because of the uncertainty triggered by the ban, which is now working its way through the courts.

‘New day’

When spring came to Rockland County at 6:20 a.m. on March 20, 2017, it was greeted, as always, with a New-Year’s-Eve-style countdown by the region’s Zoroastrians, including Marzie Jafari.

Ferzin Patel, a trustee at the Dar-e-Mehr Zoroastrian Temple in Pomona March 22, 2017.

Local followers of what is believed to be the world’s oldest monotheistic religion face Nowruz — literally “new day” — with a mix of hope, pride and uncertainty.

There is hope in the new year’s renewal, the turning of a page.

There is pride in a gleaming new temple (or dar-e-mehr) and community center in Ramapo, where Jafari and her friend Ferzin Patel are trustees.

A Nowruz table is set with seven items – traditionally, apples, grass, dried sumac berries, dried fruit of the oleaster tree, coins, garlic and a semolina pudding – signifying renewal, love, kindness, service and rebirth. All seven of the symbols begin with an “s” sound, and the table is called a “Haft-sin” – for seven “S”. This is the haft-sin table Marzie Jafari set for her Nowruz celebration in New City this year.

There is uncertainty in the impact of the travel ban, which has cast a pall over future travel to America by family members from Iran.

Zoroastrians welcome each vernal equinox, the start of spring, with family and symbols of renewal – no matter what time the equinox arrives. This year, spring arrived at 6:20 a.m. In 2012, the equinox was at 1:14 a.m., meaning that Zoroastrians began their Nowruz celebrations at that hour. They read from their holy book and greet the new year in new clothes.

A table is set with seven items – apples, grass, dried sumac berries, dried fruit of the oleaster tree, coins, garlic and a semolina pudding — signifying renewal, love, kindness, service, rebirth. All seven of the symbols begin with an “s” sound, and the table is called a “Haft-sin” — for seven “S”. As the day progresses, there are visits to family, and elders bestow money on children.

A milestone

The Dar-e-Mehr Zoroastrian Temple in Pomona March 22, 2017.

On Saturday, the region’s Zoroastrians will gather at the temple for a Nowruz celebration, a dinner for 400.

The prayer room at the Dar-e-Mehr Zoroastrian Temple in Pomona March 22, 2017.

On Sunday, they will gather again to mark the one-year anniversary of their temple, technically a “dar-e-mehr” or “door to peace” – on Pomona Road, just down the hill from Palisades Credit Union baseball stadium.

The gleaming square building with an impressive collonaded portico is the Dar-e-Mehr Zoroastrian Temple, or DMZT. It is the meeting place and sanctuary for some 1,000 followers of Zoroastrian faith from across the tri-state area.

In the year since it opened, the temple has become the community center it was envisioned to be:

One religion; two branches

Before there were Christians and Muslims and Jews, there were Zarathushtis, as its followers are called, after their prophet Zarathustra.

Marzie Jafari, left, and Ferzin Patel, trustees at the Dar-e-Mehr Zoroastrian Temple in Pomona March 22, 2017.

About 1,400 years ago, when Persia was invaded by Muslims, some Zarathushtis fled to India, where their faith took root. They are called Parsis, while those who stayed in Persia are called Iranian Zoroastrians. Jafari is an Irania Zoroastrian; Patel is a Parsi.

Both said they saw irony in the fact that an executive order that has been characterized as a “Muslim ban” is having an impact on a faith that was displaced by Muslims centuries ago.

A long view

Today, there are fewer than 200,000 Zarathushtis worldwide, and their numbers are shrinking, making the shining $4.5 million temple a beacon of optimism and hope in the next generation.

While the travel ban is concerning, both women took the longer view, perhaps a byproduct of following a religion that is 4,000 years old.

“The tradition has survived for thousands of years,” Jafari said.

“Yeah, this is nothing,” Patel said with a laugh.

Tracing the Playboy Bunnydom to Bollywood journey of the yesteryear sensation who succumbed to cancer at her central London home a week ago

No one cried for Katy Mirza, the pleasure principle of the soaring 1970s and ’80s. Not in Bollytown at least. She passed away in her central London home, close to Marble Arch, after warring with cancer, last Thursday.

Article by Khalid Mohamed | Times of India

Her cremation will be held today in the city which she had made her home for decades. A single mother, she doted on her son, Firoz.

Aapri Katy, according to most accounts, breathed her last at the age of 67. Towards her end days, she was far too incapacitated to keep in touch even on whatsapp with her friends in Mumbai.Actress Anju Mahendru and Rabia Khan, mother of the late Jiah Khan, were among her besties.

Born Katiya Mirza in Aden, hers was evidently a long and winding journey. Moving from the port city of Yemen to London and then staying on the more genteel side of the railway tracks on Mumbai’s Grant Road, she went on to maintain an elegantly appointed apartment in Juhu close to a school’s bustling compound.

“The Juhu house would remain locked except when Katy jetted in two or three times a year,“ said a source -a source I call him since he didn’t wish to be named -adding, “She was a happy woman, with a booming laugh. Nothing would faze her, except whenever anyone mentioned the names of two senior film heroes. She had never forgiven them for treating her -how should I say it -as a sex object?“ Come to think of it in the preTwitter era, Ms Mirza was vulnerable to sexism unpunctuated.Today, Sunny Leone can fire back salvos on the networking sites, and correctly so. If a boorish TV anchor body-shames her, he will get a troll-punch back on his jaw.Not so the Grant Road girl, who became the target No. 1 for puns of the butt-and-bust kind.

Lore has it that the size of her breasts were surgically reduced by ten inches. She didn’t retaliate.Anyway what the hell, practically every magazine -the glossies as well as their country cousins -were tripping over themselves to feature her on the cover. Sold-out issues were guaranteed. And the lady didn’t ever segue into the coy mode or coin catchphrases to boost her sex appeal, no instaquotes on the lines of “jo dikhtahai woh bikta hai.“

The story of Katy Mirza, indeed, is the stuff that biopics are made of today. Snag: the pieces in the puzzle would have to be imagined or researched extensively. All that’s known categorically is that the daughter of an income-tax commissioner once studied graphic design in London. A U-turn next: a job at the city’s Hilton Hotel where she was spotted by the roving scouts of Playboy magazine, whose centrespreads were the prime source for X-rated entertainment in print.

The magazine’s Bossman Hugh Hefner, yesteryear’s closest version of Donald Trump, auditioned the Hilton employee. And a Playboy Bunny was born, pos ing for the centrespreads frequently reserved for winners of beauty pageants and top-of-theline models.

It’s a swifter-than-a-blush stay in Bunnydom. Perhaps that impelled her to think Bollywood, or perhaps some filmmaker made her an offer she couldn’t refuse, only to realise that there are no free offers in any show town. Her contemporary, Persis Khambatta, couldn’t quite make whoopee at Bombay’s studios, and sought to `star trek’ to Hollywood. Still Katy wasn’t Persis, she followed her dream only to be ghettoised as a starlet. And believe this, she was described as, and I quote, “Every Indian man’s wet dream come true.“

Employed purely for the titillation quotient in A and B-grade movies -take the Amitabh Bachchan-Raakhee breezer Kasme Vaade, the politically controversial Kissa Kussi Ka, the Vinod Khanna-Reena Roy crime drama Jail Yatra and the seven-year-ol itchish Chadhi Jawani Budhe Nu in Punjabi -here was a stairway to no-exit. Chalo London again.Appearances in episodes of the TV series The Garland and The Magician of Samarkhand are cited.

The grapevine of those Bunny days suggest a “closeness“ to Hussein bin Talal, the King of Jordan. Subsequently, she fell in love with a man of Pakistani origin, who runs The Lahore Kabab House in East London. They chose not to marry.

The Katy Mirza story wound to a quiet, undramatic end.Whether it was a happy one or a somewhere-in-her heart a disappointing one, I’ll never know.

By the way, unbeknownst to many she would model frequently and once late at night, travelled all alone in a bus from Bombay to Pune to shoot for a scooter ad. In this context, that aforecited, diffident source, remarked,“If you ask me Katy was an asli braveheart. Only in those days, no one acknowledged her guts.“

I’d go with that totally. Rest in glory, Katy.

The Supreme Court early this week quashed as “infructuous” a running battle between two groups of eminent Parsis raging past five years over a nine-decade old Parsi hospital lying defunct and in a derelict condition in the Flora Fountain area of Mumbai for over four decades.

Article by FPJ Bureau, freepressjournal.in

It dismissed an appeal of Bombay Parsi Panchayet chairman Dinshaw Rusi Mehta and other trustees as “infructuous” since the Krimson Health Venture Private Limited, which was to build a super specialty hospital on the trust land of Parsi Lying-in Hospital (PLIH), has withdrawn from the agreement on November 3, 2015.

In its judgment on Wednesday, the Bench of Justices R K Agrawal and Abhay Manohar Sapre said it was disposing of the appeal without giving any opinion since it became infructuous for all practical purposes. A maternity home for the Parsis was running from the hospital till 1960s.

PLIH counsel wanted heavy cost imposed on the petitioners for dragging their Trust and the trustees in the fruitless litigation, but the Court refused to impose any cost in view of the fact that it had declined to examine the issues on merits.

The Bombay Parsi Panchayet (BPP) trustees had come in appeal against the Bombay High Court dismissing their petition on April 30, 2015 challenging the agreement entered by PLIH trust with the Krimson health service company and approved by the Charity Commissioner.

Some of the BPP trustees entered into the tussle on the strength of the transfer of the lease deed of the land by the hospital trust way back in April 1924, objecting to the new venture on the site without its consent. The Apex Court said no need of deciding legality and correctness since the very agreement, the bone of contention, no longer subsists.

It said the BPP and the PLIH are at liberty to enter into any other agreement or scheme in relation to the land/hospital, after obtaining necessary approval from the Charity Commissioner as required under the Act. It also asked the trustees to take all decisions keeping in view the directions of the (original) author of the trust.

In its observations before parting, the Supreme Court said it is the duty of every trusty to jointly and severally fulfill the object of the Trust as per the directions of its author given at the time of its creation.

Noting that the trustees belong to Parsi community enjoying high status in the society and persons of eminence in their respective fields, the Court said there should be no reason as to why any trustee should try to cause any harm to the interest of the Trust or act prejudicially and against its interest.

It said there may be differences relating to the affairs of the Trust but the uppermost remains “interest of the Trust and the beneficiaries” and that would be every trustee’s “real selfless service to the Trust and its beneficiaries” to bring good to them.

Asking the trustees to keep in mind these observations while discharging their individual and collective duties, the Court said they should ensure that the Trust is able to do charity in letter and spirit for the good of humanity — indeed that being the only wish of the creator/author while forming the Trust.

FEZANA, Federation of Zoroastrian Associations of North America informs

It is with great pride that FEZANA congratulates it’s newest member association the Sacramento Zoroastrian Association on the opening of their new Dar-E-Mehr on Sunday March 26, 2017.

FEZANA President Homi D. Gandhi represented the FEZANA executive and was joined by Past Presidents Firdosh Mehta and Bomi Patel on this auspicious occasion.

In the last twelve months this is the third new Dar-E-Mehr to be inaugurated. The Sacramento Dar-E-Mehr shares its founding day with the New York Dar-E-Mehr that was inaugurated exactly a year ago in 2016.

Below are some photographs of the opening event. To see more pictures visit FEZANA.org

To know more about the entire Sacramento Dar-E-Mehr project visit their website

UPDATE: Due to a technical glitch, an earlier version of this article linked to a picture of Mr. Nariman. The error was on our part and we are sorry for this mistake.

Former solicitor general of India Tehmtan Andhyarujina passed away on Tuesday. He was 83 years old. He practiced law for six decades and has left behind a legacy in judgments he helped shape with his submissions as counsel, on constitutional law.

Article by Swati Deshpande | TNN

Among the many landmark cases he contributed his erudite mind and legal skills to, include the seminal Kesavananda Bharati case in which the Supreme Court laid down the ‘basic structure doctrine’ and while limiting power of the Parliament on amending the Constitution, strengthened the power of judicial review.

Andhyarujina, was also the Maharashtra advocate general in 1993 till 1995, before he became the solicitor general in Delhi between 1996-1998. A graduate of law in 1957 from Government Law College in Mumbai, he was chose to join law despite qualifying for the Indian Foreign service in 1958. He had joined the chambers of the legendary jurist and Constitutional expert H M Seervai.

“Andhyarujina’s contribution to constitutional jurisprudence was immense,” said a lawyer in Mumbai expressing sorrow as funeral took place at the Parsi Doongarwadi on Tuesday. One of his concerns as a jurist has been about the existing system of judicial appointments, much before the debate arose in public domain over the collegium and National judicial appointments commission. In 2013, four decades after the seminal judgment, Andhyarujina had authored the book, The Kesavananda Bharati Case: The untold story of struggle for supremacy by Supreme Court and Parliament. The book, analysed not the judgment, but the very people, in court and behind-the-scenes conflicts that resulted in the pathbreaking verdict.

Few know that as solicitor general, his valuable assistance, paved way for the landmark guidelines laid down by the apex court in 1997 in the Vishakha case to protect women from sexual harassment at the workplace.

It was Andhyarujina, whose erudition the SC sought when it had made him an amicus curiae (friend of court) in the defining Aruna Shanbaug euthanasia case in 2011. Author Pinky Virani had filed the petition as ‘next friend’ of Mumbai nurse Aruna who was left in a persistent vegetative state following a horrendous crime, 37 years ago, to stop feeding her and to let her die peacefully. Andhyarujina had submitted that though the humanistic intention of Pinky Virani cannot be doubted, it is the opinion of the attending doctors and nursing staff which is more relevant in this case as they have looked after her for so many years. He submitted that the He had submitted that the withdrawal of nutrition by stopping essential food by means of nasogastric tube is not the same as unplugging a ventilator which artificially breathes air into the lungs of a patient incapable of breathing resulting in instant death. His submission was that decision to withdraw life support is taken in the best interests of the patient by a body of medical persons, not court. The SC had rejected her plea.

He worked with the same quiet dedication, bringing his expertise and depth of knowledge into analysis and interpretation of law, to assist the apex judiciary, till the very end. On his demise on Tuesday, advocate Ganesh Khare tweeted, “He was one of the very few experts on constitutional law. Will be missed. Great Contribution to Indian law.”

After his funeral at the Parsi Doongerwadi in Mumbai, eminent jurist himself, Iqbal Chagla expressed the sorrow that many in the profession are feeling. “It is a very sad day today when we lost another giant in the profession. Just few days ago, we lost Anil Diwan. Andhyarujina was one of the most respected lawyers, came from a great chamber and went on to achieve great heights as AG and then solicitor general, we feel a great sense of loss”.

When the corporate battle at Tata Sons was being fought out a few months ago, a strange mystery came to light.

In the list of Tata Sons shareholders made public, the Tata Trusts owned 266,610 shares, the Shapoorji Pallonji family owned 74,352 shares, various Tata companies owned 49,365 shares, and members of the Tata family owned a total of 8,235 shares. But among these large chunks of shareholdings, there was one single, solitary share that was owned by somebody named Virendra Singh Chauhan of Chota Udaipur.

Article by Anvar Alikhan, scroll.in

The question was, who was this unknown princeling, and how did he get to own this one share in Tata Sons?

After all, it was an unlisted company, and its shareholding was restricted to a small, tight circle of Tata insiders. Even the Shapoorji Pallonji family were considered outsiders, and their acquisition of Tata Sons shares through a series of private deals was resented by the Tata family as an “intrusion”.

There was obviously some interesting backstory to all this. But nobody seemed to know what it was.

Nobody knew who Virendra Singh Chauhan of Chota Udaipur was – or the circumstances in which he came into possession of his Tata Sons shareholding. And, to add to the mystery, there was the puzzling question of why he owned just that one share.

In an effort to solve this mystery, I began asking around. But, frustratingly, people who should have known the answers were reluctant to talk about it, perhaps because the matter was considered controversial while the corporate battle was still raging. Finally though, the pieces began to fall into place.

I discovered that the mysterious Virendra Singh Chauhan of Chota Udaipur – or, to use his real name, Maharawal Virendrasinhji Natwarsinhji Chauhan – was dead. In fact, he had been dead for over 10 years. I managed to track down his son, Jai Pratap Sinhji.

Chota Udaipur was a small princely state in Gujarat, ruled by descendants of Prithviraj Chauhan. Its maharawals – the title given to the rulers – were patrons of art and architecture.

Maharawal Natwarsinhji, the ruler in the 1930s, was evidently a man of the world, admired by his peers for, among other things, the unique 1937 Rolls Royce Phantom that he had custom-built for himself, with a gilded interior, designed to look like a railway saloon, so that it created the illusion of travelling by train. The car had a second dashboard specially installed at the back, so that its royal passengers could see keep track of its speed and mileage.

When Maharawal Natwarsinhji suddenly died while on holiday in Lisbon in 1946, the title passed on to his son, Virendrasinhji, who was only 11 years old. Thus, during the tumultuous period in 1947 when, along with the other princely states, Chota Udaipur was integrated into independent India, Virendrasinhji was only a minor.

He was educated at Daly College, Indore – the school set up for the princelings of Central India – and he grew up to develop an unusual business sense. An issue of the Economic Weekly from the year 1962 describes Virendrasinhji as an “industrialist”, and lists him as a director of National Ekco, a Tata company set up for the manufacture of radios. He was, remarkably, just 25 years old at the time – the same age, coincidentally, as Ratan Tata, who was then just an apprentice at Tata Steel, shovelling limestone and learning to operate the blast furnace.

Virendrasinhji went on, over time, to become the director of various companies, sitting on boards with illustrious industrialists and company directors of the time, like SS Kirloskar, BM Ghia, MS Talaulicar, Navroz B Vakil, the Maharaja of Baroda, and Hasham Premji (father of Azim Premji). But, more significantly, Virendrasinhji – while still in his early 30s – became a director of Tata Mills, chaired by Naval Tata, the father of Ratan Tata. He also sat on company boards with other members of the Tata family, and, thus, over the years, he became a trusted Tata insider.

Virendrasinhji’s role as a company director was mutually reinforced by his role as a socialite and bon vivant, fond of hunting, horses, billiards, racing and cricket, and a member of various clubs in Mumbai and London. He received a privy purse of Rs 212,000 a year – a very handsome sum at a time when the managing director of a company typically earned an annual salary of Rs 42,000. He also continued to be listed in The Royalty, Peerage and Aristocracy of the World until the time when princely privileges were abolished in 1971.

So how did he get to own that one mysterious Tata Sons share?

According to his son, Jai Pratap Sinhji, sometime in the 1980s, Virendrasinhji was allotted “twelve or thirteen” shares in Tata Sons because of his close relationship with JRD Tata. The son is not sure of the exact number of shares acquired, nor does he know the circumstances of the transaction. But presumably it was part of some kind of internal tidying up exercise – as sometimes happens in unlisted companies – when a parcel of shares become available, and a suitably reliable party is needed to take charge of them. It was thus a mark of the trust the Tatas had in Virendrasinhji that he was selected for this purpose. And, conversely, it was a matter of prestige for him to be able to hold those shares. It was also, incidentally, an investment that would prove to be a huge multi-bagger over the years.

So, if Virendrasinhji was allotted “twelve or thirteen” shares in Tata Sons, how come the records now show that he holds just one share?

Bombay House, the head office of the Tata Group.

According to his son, in 1998, Virendrasinhji was setting up a garment manufacturing business in Bengaluru and he sold his Tata Sons shares to help raise the necessary funds. But when doing so, he was prudent enough to retain one share, so that he would continue to have the rare privilege of being a shareholder of Tata Sons. It was an act that would seem to reflect the Latin motto on the Chota Udaipur coat-of-arms: “Memoria manet” – meaning “The memory remains”.

The other mystery, of course, is that if Virendrasinhji died in 2005, how come the Tata Sons records still show that one share to be in his name?

The Rolls Royce of the royal family of Chota Udiapur.

It turns out that after Virendrasinhji’s death there has been some kind of dispute in the Chota Udaipur family over the succession to the title. While the title should have normally passed to his eldest son, Jai Pratap Sinhji, part of the family seems to have backed the claim of his youngest brother, Aishwarya Pratap Sinhji, for reasons they don’t like to discuss in public. And as a result of this dispute the ownership of Virendrasinhji’s one Tata Sons share is also in dispute, along with various other assets. (The confusion within the family is reflected by the fact that while the official records clearly state that the Chota Udaipur family owns one single Tata Sons share – a fact that would presumably stick unambiguously in one’s mind – Jai Pratap Sinhji thinks they still hold “four or five shares” in the company; he says he’s not quite sure.)

Given this disputed ownership of the share, when it came to the crucial shareholders’ vote on the Cyrus Mistry issue in February, the Chota Udaipur holder was punctiliously recorded as abstaining.

The palace of the Chota Udaipur royal family.

One final question: so how much is the Chota Udaipur family’s one share worth?

Well, it all depends on how you calculate it. The Shapoorji Pallonji family’s holding in Tata Sons has, for instance, been estimated to be worth anything between Rs 66,500 crore and Rs 90,000 crore. So, going by that, the Chota Udaipur share, with its face value of Rs 1,000, would today be worth anything between Rs 89 lakh and Rs 1.21 crore.

A share in Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway, in comparison, trades for about $240,000 (Rs 1.59 crore approximately). The difference, however, is that you can buy a Berkshire Hathaway share, if you have the money – but you cannot buy a Tata Sons share.

Unless, of course, you happen to be an insider, like Virendrasinhji Chauhan of Chota Udaipur.

A cliché that is often employed when marking the demise of an eminent personality is that the event represents “the end of an era”. In many cases the use of such language is symptomatic of unimaginative, even lazy, journalism. But there are occasions when the phrase acquires an undeniable aptness and resonance. One such occasion is the passing on, in quick succession, of two of the stalwarts of the Indian Bar, Anil Divan and Tehmtan Andhyarujina on 20 and 28 March respectively. With their departure, the diminishing band of lawyers who had entered the Indian legal profession in the 1950s, when standards of competence and integrity were still very high, has been depleted so decisively that fewer than half a dozen of that generation remain in our midst.

by Dr Venkat Iyer, livelaw.in

March 29th 2017 10:49 PM

Andhyarujina stood out as an epitome of decency and uprightness. An essentially self-effacing man, he never acquired the popularity – particularly among the chattering classes – that some of his more flashy contemporaries did. He seldom appeared on television or frequented the cocktail circuit. The attractions of sycophantic courtiers that are the status-symbol of many an ‘eminent jurist’ today simply passed him by.

I consider myself extraordinarily fortunate in getting to know this remarkable man at close quarters for over three decades. When I joined his chambers as a novice lawyer in 1981, he had already begun making his mark – albeit in a relatively low-key manner – as a solid exponent of constitutional and administrative law. A protégé of the redoubtable H.M. Seervai, Andhyarujina had had a supporting role in many of the leading constitutional battles of the 1960s and 1970s, including, notably, the Fundamental Rights case (Kesavananda Bharati v. State of Kerala) where he appeared alongside Seervai in a valiant but largely unsuccessful attempt to assert the supremacy of parliament.

His unshakable adherence to the doctrine of parliamentary supremacy – subject to constitutional constraints in the case of India – made him a slightly lonely figure in those times and to stand out from the likes of Nani Palkhivala during the epic constitutional battles of the Indira Gandhi era. It is a testament to Andhyarujina’s sterling personal qualities that, despite the deep polarisation that those skirmishes engendered, he was held in the highest esteem by Palkhivala (whose rather fractious relationship with Seervai became the subject of many stories). In his turn, Andhyarujina bore no ill-will towards those who were passionate in their denunciation of the Seervai line of argument (it is a delicious irony, of course, that, in his later years, Seervai himself underwent a change of heart in relation to many of the issues that he had espoused with fervour up until the late-1970s).

Another issue on which Andhyarujina ploughed a somewhat lonely furrow – at least among many of his peers – was judicial activism. His principled stand against judges straying into territory that did not belong to them did not win him the applause of the liberal elite. Nor did it fetch him any of the glittering prizes that are reserved for those who are in the vanguard of activist politics. His arguments for judicial restraint were made with conviction, courtesy and clarity in the many newspaper articles he wrote over at least the past two decades. Some of those articles – and other writings which, though not marked by literary flourishes, exuded erudition of a high order – are likely to be republished in a book being lovingly put together by a young member of his chambers in Delhi.

It is worth noting that Andhyarujina’s disapproval of judicial activism did not signal an indifference to some of the injustices that were sought to be remedied through this controversial method of grievance redressal. Quite the contrary. As anyone who has known him will testify, Andhyarujina’s deep sense of compassion – and his genuine concern for the underdog – was legendary. It probably arose from his own humble origins – and from the even humbler origins of his parents on whom he doted. Like many people of his generation, he never wore his heart on his sleeve, but those who were at the receiving end of his kindnesses and generosity could not have failed to notice his essential humaneness.

That quality also made him reticent about criticising others. Although he enjoyed his share of gossip – and I plead guilty to being a frequent conduit for tittletattle from various parts of the world which kept both of us amused for hours on end during our frequent meetings – I have seldom seen him excoriating anyone, even where excoriation was called for. This is one of the areas where I sometimes had disagreements with him. An example which comes readily to mind was his response to the fairly serious cloud that fell over the former Attorney-General of India, Goolam Vahanvati, in the aftermath of the revelations of corruption made against him by the Communist Party of India MP, Gurudas Dasgupta, in 2013. Given that the allegations were backed by detailed information that was prima facie plausible, that they were made with due responsibility, and that they elicited no credible rebuttal from Vahanvati (except for a ham-fisted attempt at threatening Dasgupta with a legal notice), I thought that Andhyarujina could have done better than remain silent in the matter, especially in the face of his shining track-record of fighting corruption in public life.

Another instance where I had reservations about his reluctance to cause offence came when he decided, on second thoughts, to pull some of his punches in his illuminating account of the behind-the-scenes manoeuvres in the Fundamental Rights case (The Kesavananda Bharati Case: The Untold Story of Struggle For Supremacy by Supreme Court and Parliament, published in 2011). In particular, he had initially intended to include a piece of information (from his personal knowledge) which would have shown one of the judges involved in the case in bad light; after some agonising, he chose to exclude any reference to the matter on the grounds that publication was likely to offend a living relative of the judge in question. I was not convinced that such deference was justified, and told him so (to his credit, he took my criticism in good grace and never let his friendship with me be affected by such expressions of dissent).

A matter that troubled him quite intensely towards the end of his life was what he perceived to be a precipitous decline in the stature of the Supreme Court of India. There were two broad aspects to his concern: firstly, the falling standards of the Court’s proceedings and output (which also implicates the increasingly poor intellectual quality of its judges) and, secondly, the runaway expansion in the role of the court (from what the founding fathers of the Constitution had envisaged as a constitutional court to an all-purpose court of appeal). For at least five years preceding his demise he lamented these developments with all the vigour he could muster, and it became a constant topic of my discussions with him.

While I could not disagree with his observations, I had some difficulty accepting his analysis of the root causes of the problem. In particular, I thought that, like many others in India whose exposure to the wider legal world had reduced significantly from around the late-1970s, he had not paid sufficient attention to such matters as the parlous state of legal education and vocational training, the absence of adequate quality assurance mechanisms (e.g. a rigorous Bar examination and a system of pupillage), and highly corrupt and weak regulatory processes currently in place. The way I saw it was that, unless a root-and-branch overhaul of the system is undertaken (including a ruthless cull of at least 80 per cent of what passes for the current advocate population), any attempt at superficial reform is foredoomed to failure.

For many years now I had urged Andhyarujina to step back from his practice and to embark on a writing career which would enable him to more constructively channel his ideas for the betterment of India’s sclerotic legal system. While expressing thanks for this piece of gratuitous advice, he would turn the tables back on me, urging me to undertake the task instead. At last, when, sadly, his recent illness compelled him to quit court work, he finally relented and agreed to devote some time to writing, and in one of my last conversations with him, we even spoke about doing some work together in July when I expected to spend a length of time in India. That, alas, will now remain an unfulfilled dream.

The other dream that Andhyarujina could not live to realise was the prospect of his beloved son, Zal, being designated a Senior Advocate. His devotion to Zal – and to other members of his family – was palpable, and it must surely have been a matter of some comfort for Andhyarujina to know, as he bade farewell to this world, that Zal was beginning to make his mark in a profession with which his family has had such intimate connections for at least three generations. The challenge now facing Zal is, of course, to live up to the high standards that his doting father achieved in his lifetime, and to carry the flame lit so luminously by him.

I will miss a dear friend who had stood like an immutable rock for all those years I had known him and to whom I could turn at any time for instruction, amusement or just an invigorating chat of no great importance. Fortuitously or otherwise, I had an opportunity to see him, in fairly good spirits despite the toll that his illness had taken on his body, some ten days before his passing when I made an impromptu decision to divert myself to Bombay en route to an engagement in Australia and spend a few precious moments with him. It is a measure of his kindness that one of the first things he said on seeing me was that Zal had, the previous evening, read out to him my article on Justice Gautam Patel (‘The Perils of Judicial Impulsiveness’, published on this site on 13 March) which he said he had thoroughly enjoyed. Grateful though I was for his compliments (as I am for similar sentiments received from numerous readers within and outside the profession who had accessed the piece in the previous few days), what mattered to me more was Andhyarujina’s reassurance that I had been fair in the way I had put my case.

The coming days and weeks will, I am sure, see numerous tributes flowing in from various corners of the world, and a common thread in all of them will, it is safe to assume, be that Tehmtan was, more than anything else, a very decent human being.

Dr Venkat Iyer is a barrister and legal academic based in Northern Ireland.

It is not often that a priest has the opportunity to baptize his own mother, but Father Hezuk Shroff will get to do just that this Easter.

Shroff comes from a Parsi family. The Parsis are an Indian minority which follow the Zoroastrian religion which was predominate in Persia before the Islamic conquest (Parsi means Persian).

by Nirmala Carvalho, cruxnow.com

is an ancient faith, and, in fact, many scholars think it likely the Magi described in the birth narrative of the Gospel of Matthew were from Zoroastrians from Persia (Magi comes from the Persian word for Zoroastrian).

The Parsis began immigrating into what is now India to escape persecution nearly 1000 years ago, and now make up the largest community of Zoroastrians in the world.

Shroff was born to a Zoroastrian family in India in 1971, which later emigrated to Canada where they involved themselves with a small Zoroastrian community, although they were not particularly religious.

“My parents were Parsi (Zoroastrian),” Shroff told Crux, “and I grew up following the teachings of this religion.”

An introspective and reserved child, he found something beautiful in the religious quest for God.

“My first name, Hezuk, was given to me by my paternal grandmother. It means ‘Light of the Universe,’ which I find very beautiful because Jesus said, ‘You are the light of the world.’ “

Shroff didn’t hear of Christianity personally until he began undergraduate studies in biochemistry at McGill University in Montreal.

There, he had a roommate, a “fervent, practicing Pentecostal Christian, (who) introduced me to the local Evangelical Church and to the Gospel, to the message of the Christian faith and to the person of Jesus,” he said.

Shroff soon began to read books about Catholicism, and in 1994 he accompanied one of his university friends to the Saturday afternoon Mass at St. Patrick’s Basilica in Montreal.

“The liturgy of the Mass fascinated me,” he said, “I knew within myself that this was a sacred moment. I fell in love with the beauty and truth of the Catholic faith as I heard about the grace of God, the Holy Eucharist, and devotion of the faithful to the Virgin Mary and to the saints…I thought to myself: This is where I’m supposed to be.”

Shroff did not tell his Protestant friends he was becoming Catholic, though he told some of the leaders that he was going to be attending another church.

“So long as it’s a Bible church,” they said. “Oh, it is for sure,” he told Crux he said to them, saying he thought to himself: “In fact, it’s the Church that gave us the Bible!”

In April 1995, Shroff was received into the Catholic Church at St. Patrick’s Basilica in Montreal during the Easter Vigil.

After his baptism, the young man felt a strong call to the priesthood. He spent the next three years in Quebec and then France with Benedictine monks before deciding he was not cut out for the life of a monk.

He spent six years with the Community of St. John, where he studied philosophy and theology. During his theological studies, the superior of the community decided to send Shroff to Cebu in the Philippines, for a period of mission.

“It is here in the Philippines after working in youth ministry, that I finally understood that God was calling me to serve as a diocesan priest,” he said.

During his mission in Cebu, Shroff noted that the young people of his community were poorly integrated into parish life.

“The young people” – he said – “told me that their pastor had no time for them, because he was too busy running the parish. I thought, ‘How sad; after all, isn’t the primary mission of a priest the care of the souls entrusted to him?’…Every day I understood more and more that God wants me to serve as a pastor, to restore the sense of prayer and contemplation in the parishes.”

He returned to Canada in September 2006, and entered St. Augustine’s Seminary in Toronto to study to become a priest for the Archdiocese of Ottawa.

He was ordained on May 13, 2011 at Notre-Dame Cathedral in Ottawa, on the Feast of Our Lady of Fatima.

Shroff’s family didn’t oppose his spiritual journey, and his father, mother, and sister all attended his ordination, along with his Zoroastrian aunt and uncle, who drove up from Chicago for the ceremony.

“My mother was very happy with my conversion, and had even been praying that I become a priest of God,” Shroff said, “It was harder for my father, but he was nonetheless very supportive of my choice and was visibly moved at the ordination ceremony.”

He said he wanted to demonstrate to his father that embracing the Catholic religion was not a rejection of his cultural heritage.

“I became Catholic not because I rejected my cultural roots or upbringing, but because I felt that Christ was calling me to be one of His own,” Shroff explained.

His mother had been familiar with the Catholic Church from childhood, because she had attended a Catholic boarding school.

“My mum has wanted to become Catholic for most of her life, but couldn’t because of external pressures and circumstances,” he said.

However, that has now changed, and his mother joined RCIA and on April 15 will be baptized by her own son.

“So she will be baptized exactly 22 years to the day when I was baptized,” said Shroff. “My mother gave me physical birth in this world; soon I will have the joy of offering her the gift of spiritual re-birth in Christ.”

The Zoroastrian Association of Greater New York (ZAGNY) invited it’s founding member and past President Professor Kaikhosrov D. Irani to deliver a talk about “Zarathushtra’s Vision and Zoroastrtianism Today”

Below is the video recording of the lecture.

Click on image above, or view on ZAGNY website

If you happen to travel to Sacramento California and ask any one where one finds a good restaurant serving Parsi food, they will tell you not to miss the restaurant operated by Dinyar Noshir Anklesaria. 

Parsi Khabar invites our readers to submit articles for publishing. This article has been written by Aspi Ustad of Vancouver, Canada

He is a name synonymous with Parsi Food in Northern California. People who know him well, call him ‘Dino’ with love.

Dinyar traveled thru East coast of US to the West, served many a celebrities in his restaurants and charmed many thru his delicious cooking recipes handed over for generations. 

He is not only good at dishing out Parsi cusine to name a few Dhanshak, sali boti, chicken farcha, patra-ni-machi, but also serves mughlai dishes which includes, Mutton Biryani, Tikka Boti, Butter Chicken, Nihari, etc.  

Born to Noshir and Roshan Anklesaria in Ahmedabad, India. Brought up in close knit parsi community of Karachi. His interest with food was attained at an early age, when he saw his mom cook delicious parsi dishes. Her Dal-ni-Pori, Bhakra, were very famous in Karachi households and till date in Vancouver. 

After completing his schooling from B V S High School, Karachi, he went on to complete his studies in science. He always dreamt like many youngsters of setting foot on American soil and achieve what’s called “The American Dream”. This American dream of succeeding in life took him to the door steps of New York city, where he started working as a car salesperson. The job did not interest him much so he moved to try his hand at cooking and start a restaurant of his own. “Times were tough. It was not easy to penetrate the restaurant market with already established brands” says Dinyar.

He partnered with a Parsi friend to set up a Parsi restaurant. He met with good success and people were flowing thru but location had parking issues which made them draw down shutters and move. ‘I had to sacrifice a lot, and make some life changing decisions at that time’ says Dinyar.

He moved to Conneticut and later travelled thru a few states before making his mark in California where he now has his roots firmly sunk in. He has established himself well in California and is a household name amongst most parsis. 

Dinyar says “They order food during special occasions like birthdays, anniversaries, Navjote, Weddings”. He laughs and says “they need a reason to order my food”.

He also provides catering service to large companies in the Silicon Valley. His vegetarian dishes are a hit amongst the cross section of population he serves in these companies. He states “Dal Makhani, Sak, topped up with mango lassi are instant hits”. He goes on to say “if someone places an order for 50 people I make sure I have more food, in case of last minute arrivals. There have been instances where the crowd  turns out to be more then the order placed by the host”.

Dinyar knows his patrons well and they know that Dinyar will never disappoint even if there are changes to the menu at the last moment or if the number of guests goes up.

Dinyar attributes his art of cooking to his mom Roshan from whom he learnt cooking in his earlier days and attributes his taste for good food to his dad Noshir from whom he also learnt the art to negotiate at the time of buying groceries.

Presently he has ventured into consulting and managing restaurants, wherein he takes up restaurants which are not doing well and turns them into profitable ventures. He says “First thing I look at is the menu and suggests changes, then I look at the décor, if it is not suitable I get it changed. These things bring in more business for restaurants and some of the owners do not pay attention to these finer details”. His consultancy is increasing and he has to turn down some of the offers he gets. As he says “I am a one man band and cope up with so much of quality work and do not want to disappoint anyone”

Talk of ‘us’ and ‘them’ has long dominated Iran-related politics in the West. At the same time, Christianity has frequently been used to define the identity and values of the US and Europe, as well as to contrast those values with those of a Middle Eastern ‘other’. Yet, a brief glance at an ancient religion – still being practised today – suggests that what many take for granted as wholesome Western ideals, beliefs and culture may in fact have Iranian roots.

Article by Joobin Bekhrad, bbc.com

Even the idea of Satan is a fundamentally Zoroastrian one

It is generally believed by scholars that the ancient Iranian prophet Zarathustra (known in Persian as Zartosht and Greek as Zoroaster) lived sometime between 1500 and 1000 BC. Prior to Zarathustra, the ancient Persians worshipped the deities of the old Irano-Aryan religion, a counterpart to the Indo-Aryan religion that would come to be known as Hinduism. Zarathustra, however, condemned this practice, and preached that God alone – Ahura Mazda, the Lord of Wisdom – should be worshipped. In doing so, he not only contributed to the great divide between the Iranian and Indian Aryans, but arguably introduced to mankind its first monotheistic faith.

Zoroaster likely lived between 1500 and 1000 BC, but some scholarship suggests he may have been a contemporary of Persian emperors Cyrus the Great and Darius I (Credit: Alamy)

The idea of a single god was not the only essentially Zoroastrian tenet to find its way into other major faiths, most notably the ‘big three’: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. The concepts of Heaven and Hell, Judgment Day and the final revelation of the world, and angels and demons all originated in the teachings of Zarathustra, as well as the later canon of Zoroastrian literature they inspired. Even the idea of Satan is a fundamentally Zoroastrian one; in fact, the entire faith of Zoroastrianism is predicated on the struggle between God and the forces of goodness and light (represented by the Holy Spirit, Spenta Manyu) and Ahriman, who presides over the forces of darkness and evil. While man has to choose to which side he belongs, the religion teaches that ultimately, God will prevail, and even those condemned to hellfire will enjoy the blessings of Paradise (an Old Persian word).

How did Zoroastrian ideas find their way into the Abrahamic faiths and elsewhere? According to scholars, many of these concepts were introduced to the Jews of Babylon upon being liberated by the Persian emperor Cyrus the Great. They trickled into mainstream Jewish thought, and figures like Beelzebub emerged. And after Persia’s conquests of Greek lands during the heyday of the Achaemenid Empire, Greek philosophy took a different course. The Greeks had previously believed humans had little agency, and that their fates were at the mercy of their many gods, whom often acted according to whim and fancy. After their acquaintance with Iranian religion and philosophy, however, they began to feel more as if they were the masters of their destinies, and that their decisions were in their own hands.

Could Dante have been influenced by Zoroastrianism?

Though it was once the state religion of Iran and widely practised in other regions inhabited by Persian peoples (eg Afghanistan, Tajikistan and much of Central Asia), Zoroastrianism is today a minority religion in Iran, and boasts few adherents worldwide. The religion’s cultural legacy, however, is another matter. Many Zoroastrian traditions continue to underpin and distinguish Iranian culture, and outside the country, it has also had a noted impact, particularly in Western Europe.

Zoroastrian rhapsody

Centuries before Dante’s Divine Comedy, the Book of Arda Virafdescribed in vivid detail a journey to Heaven and Hell. Could Dante have possibly heard about the cosmic Zoroastrian traveller’s report, which assumed its final form around the 10th Century AD? The similarity of the two works is uncanny, but one can only offer hypotheses.

View image of Temple in Yazd (Credit: Alamy)

Elsewhere, however, the Zoroastrian ‘connection’ is less murky. The Iranian prophet appears holding a sparkling globe in Raphael’s 16th Century School of Athens. Likewise, the Clavis Artis, a late 17th/early 18th-Century German work on alchemy was dedicated to Zarathustra, and featured numerous Christian-themed depictions of him. Zoroaster “came to be regarded [in Christian Europe] as a master of magic, a philosopher and an astrologer, especially after the Renaissance,” says Ursula Sims-Williams of the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London.

Zoroastrianism may have been the first monotheistic religion, and its emphasis on dualities, such as heaven and hell, appear in Judaism, Christianity and Islam (Credit: Alamy)

Today, mention of the name Zadig immediately brings to mind the French fashion label Zadig & Voltaire. While the clothes may not be Zoroastrian, the story behind the name certainly is. Written in the mid-18th Century by none other than Voltaire, Zadigtells the tale of its eponymous Persian Zoroastrian hero, who, after a series of trials and tribulations, ultimately weds a Babylonian princess. Although flippant at times and not rooted in history, Voltaire’s philosophical tale sprouted from a genuine interest in Iran also shared by other leaders of the Enlightenment. So enamoured with Iranian culture was Voltaire that he was known in his circles as ‘Sa’di’. In the same spirit, Goethe’s West-East Divan, dedicatedto the Persian poet Hafez, featured a Zoroastrian-themed chapter, while Thomas Moore lamented the fate of Iran’s Zoroastrians in Lalla Rookh.

Freddie Mercury was intensely proud of his Persian Zoroastrian heritage

It wasn’t only in Western art and literature that Zoroastrianism made its mark; indeed, the ancient faith also made a number of musical appearances on the European stage.

In addition to the priestly character Sarastro, the libretto of Mozart’s The Magic Flute is laden with Zoroastrian themes, such as light versus darkness, trials by fire and water, and the pursuit of wisdom and goodness above all else. And the late Farrokh Bulsara – aka Freddie Mercury – was intensely proud of his Persian Zoroastrian heritage. “I’ll always walk around like a Persian popinjay,” he once remarked in an interview, “and no one’s gonna stop me, honey!” Likewise, his sister Karishma Cooke in a 2014 interview reflected on the role of Zoroastrianism in the family. “We as a family were very proud of being Zoroastrian,” she said. “I think what [Freddie’s] Zoroastrian faith gave him was to work hard, to persevere, and to follow your dreams.”

Ice and fire

When it comes to music, though, perhaps no single example best reflects the influence of Zoroastrianism’s legacy than Richard Strauss’ Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which famously provided the booming backbone to much of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. The score owes its inspiration to Nietzsche’s magnum opus of the same name, which follows a prophet named Zarathustra, although many of the ideas Nietzsche proposes are, in fact, anti-Zoroastrian. The German philosopher rejects the dichotomy of good and evil so characteristic of Zoroastrianism – and, as an avowed atheist, he had no use for monotheism at all.

Zoroastrians worship in fire temples, such as this one in Yazd, Iran – they believe fire and water are the twin agents of purity and necessary for ritual cleansing (Credit: Alamy)

Freddie Mercury and Zadig & Voltaire aside, there are other overt examples of Zoroastrianism’s impact on contemporary popular culture in the West. Ahura Mazda served as the namesake for the Mazda car company, as well as the inspiration for the legend of Azor Ahai – a demigod who triumphs over darkness – in George RR Martin’s Game of Thrones, as many of its fans discovered last year. As well, one could well argue that the cosmic battle between the Light and Dark sides of the Force in Star Warshas, quite ostensibly, Zoroastrianism written all over it.

Towers of Silence, such as this one in Chilpyk, Uzbekistan, are where Zoroastrians would leave the bodies of the dead to be consumed by birds (Credit: Alamy)

For all its contributions to Western thought, religion and culture, relatively little is known about the world’s first monotheistic faith and its Iranian founder. In the mainstream, and to many US and European politicians, Iran is assumed to be the polar opposite of everything the free world stands for and champions. Iran’s many other legacies and influences aside, the all but forgotten religion of Zoroastrianism just might provide the key to understanding how similar ‘we’ are to ‘them’.

Our dear friend Meher Heroyce Moos draws our attention to the passing away of Maneck Dalal, who headed Air-India in London for many years and was a truly amazing person.

Maneck Ardheshir Dalal OBE & Regional Director Air India, UK for several years was handpicked by JRD Tata himself. He was known to many as a thorough gentleman with great sense of achievement. During his illustrious career he held numerous directorships in industry and voluntary sector.  May his soul RIP.

MANECK DALAL WHO OPENED AIR INDIA OFFICE IN LONDON AND WELCOMED ITS FIRST FLIGHT PASSES AWAY AT 98

Maneck Dalal, who played a key role in the birth of Air-India International in 1948 when he was sent to the UK by J.R.D. Tata, chairman of the Tata group of companies, died in London on 6^th March. He was 98.

Dalal was not a stranger to Britain because he had been an undergraduate at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where he had an agreeable time captaining the university at tennis and squash.

He shared digs with an Indian prince who scandalized his landlady by telling her: “I won’t need any dinner tonight – I am off to London to see the whores.” Dalal would chuckle as he recounted: “What the prince meant was he was off to see the Hoares.” The Hoares were a distinguished banking family.

After being called to the Bar in the Middle Temple in 1945, Dalal returned to India with his English wife, Kathleen (Kay) Richardson.

He joined Tata Airlines in Delhi in 1946. He found himself engaged in rescuing his Muslim servants from communal frenzy, while at the same time looking after his wife, who was pregnant with their first child.

Just then, JRD came up with the idea of starting an international carrier, Air-India International Ltd. Initially, the government wanted to own all the equity but agreed to a compromise solution under which the government had 49 per cent of the shares, the Tatas 25 per cent and the public the remaining 26 per cent.

It helped that the Tatas had placed an order for three Constellation planes with Lockheed but delivery came through earlier than expected because another customer had cancelled.

Maneck Dalal, then 29, was packed off to London by JRD in early 1948 and would later recount how he found Heathrow was just a collection of huts. Air-India’s traffic department was initially in a caravan and after six months another caravan arrived.

Dalal remembered the winter of 1948: “We had to trudge through slush and mud to get to the caravan and had oil heaters to keep us warm. It was a question of suffocating from the oil fumes or freezing of cold…. London airport was a wide stretch of area with hardly any development – a large number of rabbits and hare could be seen jumping around. The only person who had the right to shoot them was the Commandant of the airport.”

Air-India’s inaugural flight on the Constellation, named Malabar Princess, took off from Bombay on June 8, 1948, just after midnight. On board were JRD and his wife, the Jamsaheb of Nawanagar and industrialist Neville Wadia.

Dalal was at the airport to receive the flight and to see it start the return journey on June 10. This was the start of a twice-weekly service. At the time only BOAC, Pan Am, TWA, KLM and Air France operated from Heathrow.

He was formally appointed Air-India’s regional director (UK) in 1959 and held the job until 1977.

He was close to his boss but nevertheless got a firing from JRD when he took on expensive offices in New Bond Street.

He later described what happened: “I asked him to see the proposition before letting loose and went on to explain how and why I did what I had to do. Big man that he was, he saw my side and immediately sent a telex back home, ‘Accept Dalal’s proposition fully. Please put it up to the board and recommend that the chairman has suggested it.”

This was a time when Air-India did indeed offer a Maharaja service and there was a certain style and elegance, which Dalal ushered in. Every summer he would host a champagne party for members of the Cambridge University India Society. When some wondered whether such extravagance was necessary, Dalal would deflect criticism with characteristic charm. “They are my future passengers,” he would say.

After retiring from Air-India, he was managing director for the Tata group of companies in the UK from 1977-1988.

Among his many public duties, he chaired the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan (Indian Cultural Centre) in London for 40 years until 2011.

He always urged Indians to “remember the culture of your motherland while pledging total loyalty to this country. The culture you have inherited at your country of birth is very good in this mad world of today. Indian culture is the bedrock of sanity.”

Maneck Ardeshir Sohrab Dalal was born in Bombay on December 24, 1918.

His death was announced by Malcolm Deboo, president of the Zoroastrian Trust Funds of Europe where Dalal was a trustee from 1980-88. He died in hospital on March 6.

He is survived by his wife, his daughters Suzy and Caroline and other members of his family.

The Parsis are associated today solely with Western classical music. The Swar Sadhana Samiti’s annual festival this week reminds us that this tiny community also led the way in promoting Hindustani music in Mumbai.

Article by Sumana Ramanan | Mumbai Mirror

In a small room in Jer Annex, a building around the corner from Kyani, one of the city’s oldest Irani cafés, in Dhobi Talao, stands a long table with a marble top. It is an altar to the Hindu goddess Saraswati, whose two-feet tall idol sits on one end. Next to it stands a portrait of the Parsi prophet Zarathustra, followed by photographs of Keki Jijina and his protégé, Aban Mistry.

This is the 400-square-foot office of the Swar Sadhana Samiti, a non-profit organisation co-founded in 1961 by the late Jijina and late Mistry to promote Hindustani music in the city. Jijina, who passed away in 2003, was primarily a sitar player who had learnt from Ravi Shankar among others, but had also gained some expertise in playing the tabla and violin. Mistry, who passed away in 2012, was one of post-Independence India’s first professional female tabla players, having learnt from the great maestro Amir Hussain Khan.

“Our twin aims are to ensure that unsung talents in Indian classical music and dance get an opportunity to perform, while also inviting established artistes,” said Rupa Sethna, 68, who is part of the managing committee, which consists of a second generation that is carrying forward the founders’ mission.

The Samiti, which holds its 52nd annual festival on Saturday (see box), is a product of a time when Parsis, today associated largely with Western classical music, were equally involved with Indian classical music in the city. The Samiti also symbolises the deeply syncretic culture of Hindustani music, which is a melting pot of different linguistic and religious communities, both among the artiste and listening communities. As the altar in the Samiti’s office shows, many musicians identified with and incorporated cultural practices of religions other than the one into which they were born, with no sense of contradiction.

In her book, The Parsis and Indian Classical Music, Aban Mistry lists several accomplished artistes from her community who were active in the 20th century. The better known among them were the Gwalior gharana singer Jal Balaporia (1917-2013), the Kirana gharana vocalist Firoz Dastur (1919-2008) and sarod player Zarin Sharma (born Daruwala) (1946-2014), besides Mistry and Jijina themselves. Mistry also mentions the less-known singers Khorshed Minocherhomji, who was called ‘Saraswati Devi’ and learnt from the Agra gharana’s SN Ratanjankar in Lucknow, and Shirin Ratnagar, who learnt dhrupad from Zahiruddin Dagar.

Parsis’ involvement with Indian classical music can be traced back to the heyday of Parsi opera in the latter half of the 19th century, which used Urdu or Gujarati, and whose music was based on classical ragas. Even before their Marathi counterparts, Parsi musical troupes hired famous classical musicians to train their actors to sing.

This connection spawned the Gayan Uttejak Mandali, perhaps the city’s first music club, founded in 1870 by the journalist and writer Kaikhushro Kabrajee (1842-1904). An idea mooted by the musicologist VN Bhatkhande, these clubs were to include teaching, research, performances and publishing. The Mandali celebrated its centenary but its most active years were until 1920. Its aim was “to propagate among the Parsis a liking for indigenous music and promote songs and music which are moral and also with proper sur and tal.”

The Samiti inherited this ethos. “Aban Mistry was respected by everyone in the field, and she and the Samiti enjoyed tremendous goodwill,” said the Mumbai-based tabla player Aneesh Pradhan, who has performed several times for the organisation. “People were aware that her work was selfless.”

Moreover, Jijina and Mistry inspired a new generation to continue their work after they were gone. The committee members all work on a voluntary basis. “The Samiti and similar organisations work tirelessly, and are vital to the overall Hindustani music environment as they work through the year and over several decades, and provide a platform for young and senior musicians,” Pradhan said.

The Samiti’s annual all-India competitions in January for young musicians of different age groups also fosters a sense of loyalty for the organisation among musicians because many have won prizes there when they were younger and got a crucial early platform at a the concerts of prize-winners.

One of the highlights of the Samiti’s year is its annual festival, Swarsadhanotsav, which will also be its 666th monthly programme. Sethna is proud of the fact that all key committee members are always present at these events. “Apart from ill health, no excuses are valid,” she said.

The Samiti has a third generation that is invested in keeping it going: Sethna’s children as well as those of Feroze and Nazneen Katila, a couple in the early 50s who are also on the managing committee, and those of the president, Jiten Zaveri, are closely involved with the institution. “Our children know all the artistes and the artistes know them,” said Sethna.

What the Samiti could use is a healthy infusion of funds. So far, it has run on a corpus of donations and membership fees, but costs, of renting premises and paying artistes, are rising. “It is never easy,” Sethna said. “But we feel blessed to be able to do such noble work, and hope that Ma Saraswati allows us to continue.”

Image: From top: The Swar Sadhana Samiti’s first monthly programme in 1961: Keki Jijina on the sitar, accompanied by his son, Sapal Jijina; The Swar Sadhana Samiti’s 665th monthly programme in March 2017: Shivani Marulkar Dasakkar was one of the artistes who performed; A book in a series written by Firoze Framjee, a sitar player and musicologist active in the early 20th century

A policeman, an army ranger and a government schoolteacher come to the home of a Parsi married to a Christian. If you think that sounds like the beginning of a joke, you are partially right.

Article by Lynette Viccaji | Dawn

My driver informed me that the census team had arrived. It was a dry, gusty day, and the three looked rather the worse for wear. I invited them to come in and sit down, but they bravely refused, saying that this would take just a few minutes. Famous last words.

So we stood in my gateway, amid little dunes of piled-up sand. Balancing his register on one arm, the schoolteacher held his pen poised over the page.

“Names?” he asked.

“Here we go again,” I thought. Our names have been mangled so many times by Pakistani officialdom, that I have lost count of the variations. To spare him and ourselves this misery, I offered to write them in for him. He wouldn’t have it. He was writing in Urdu, so this would be a matter of phonetics.

I carefully enunciated each name, watching as the man exercised all his ingenuity to translate the alien sounds into letters.

Then the inevitable question, “Are you Pakistani?”

Yes, I assured him, we are all Pakistani.

He asked me if we had moved to Karachi from another country.

I told him that we haven’t.

“Well, my husband came from India with his parents when he was a child, but he is now very much a Pakistani, and the rest of us were all born here.”

“Yes, our first language is English. Yes, we are Pakistani, but our first language is English – look, I’m talking to you in Urdu right now, aren’t I?”

Ages, marital status, education and employment all went smoothly. Then came religion. The pen hovered over my husband’s name.

“Parsi,” I said. Blank stares.

“Zoroastrian,” I said. More blank looks.

“It’s a religion,” I assured them.

Three heads crowded together as they searched the alternatives in the form: Muslim, Hindu, Christian, Ahmedi, and Scheduled Castes. No Parsis. Consternation. The policeman came to the rescue. “Other!” he said triumphantly, pointing to the last alternative. Sighs of relief all around. So they chose ‘other’.

The author and her husband with their friends.

As they were about to put me into this category as well, I delivered another bombshell. “I’m a Christian.” Well, at least that had a category to itself, but I still received incredulous looks. Before they could ask again, I reassured them that we were Pakistani. They needed my NIC number, so I produced my card, which must have gone some way to reassuring them of my citizenship.

However, true to my profession, I couldn’t let go of this teachable moment. “You must have heard of Parsis,” I said.

“There are very few of them left now, but they were and are an important part of this city. Jehangir Kothari Parade?” They had never heard of it.

“Avari? Avari hotels?” I asked in desperation. Finally, familiarity flickered in their eyes when I told them Mr Avari is a Parsi.

Then I delivered the coup de grace: “Haven’t you heard of the Quaid-i-Azam’s wife? Ruttie Jinnah? She was a Parsi.”

They laughed and looked at each other in amazement. They clearly hadn’t heard of this part of history.

“Today we have increased our knowledge!” Grinning good-naturedly, they thanked me.

As they were leaving, I gave them a bottle of cold water to toast their enlightenment.

Lynette Viccaji lives in Karachi and is a teacher and teacher-educator.

Sitting with, and listening to, Jamsheed Marker is a fulfilling experience. History, diplomacy, anecdotes about politicians, music, culture, and a lot of cricket — he enlightens his audience in many ways. At 94, he possesses a remarkable memory and speaks coherently even though his physical weakness has bound him to a wheelchair.

Article by Syed Jaffar Ahmed | Herald Dawn

Marker has been Pakistan’s ambassador in more countries than any other diplomat. He has a plethora of information and memories from those assignments in different capitals of the world. He has seen the formative phase of Pakistan from close quarters and is witness to some of the most decisive phases of the country’s history, the separation of East Pakistan being one.

Jamsheed Marker at his home in Karachi | Malika Abbas, White Star

Cricket has also been Marker’s passion. He dawned on the horizon of Pakistani cricket as its earliest commentator along with the redoubtable Omar Kureishi. The two had amazing chemistry that made cricket commentary in Pakistan as popular as the sport itself.

Marker, who comes from a Parsi business family, is a lover of music and the arts. He spends a lot of time in his study where walls are lined with bookracks, memorabilia, paintings and photographs.

Syed Jaffar Ahmed. A number of books have come out in the last 15 years or so that talk about Pakistan as a failed or failing state. After such a long and rich experience of living in Pakistan, how do you see its future?

Jamsheed Marker. During the creation of Pakistan, there were doubts whether the state would come into existence at all. I remember a party one evening at New Delhi Club where a group of people – Hindus, Muslims and Europeans – were arguing fiercely and plenty of whiskey was flowing around. This was sometime in July 1947. The subject was ‘how long Pakistan will last — six months or six years’. I heard [someone] saying, ‘They will come back begging to us within three months, asking us to take them back.’ Now that was the attitude of a lot of people. We had nothing. When I say nothing I mean minus, zero. It was just the iron will of this man [Muhammed Ali Jinnah] who really put this country out. He said, ‘There is no need to get scared; we will survive.’

“Liaquat Ali Khan was in complete command but he exercised his power in an exemplary fashion”

From Delhi, I came to Karachi. As I was driving [from the airport to the Cantt railway station], I saw those refugee camps. People in them were all bloodied. They had been through riots. They had no clothes or anything, just small broken-up suitcases. [But] you heard them shouting ‘Pakistan Zindabad’ from each refugee camp. The situation was such where you couldn’t be happy. You’d see children in their bloodied clothes crying and mothers on the roads yelling. But those people had unbelievable passion — all because of this one man. They were determined to survive any situation.

Ahmed. How did this resolve continue after Quaid-e-Azam died?

Marker. We had Liaquat [Ali Khan] who was a man of impeccable devotion for Pakistan. The things this man did –– you cannot believe that they can be done here. He left a lot of his property, thousands of acres, in his hometown [in India]. The house he had in Delhi was in the best locality. He knew what he had to do for Pakistan. He led from the front and he was totally, totally devoted. His last words were ‘Allah Pakistan ki hifazat kare’ (May God protect Pakistan).

Marker at the United Nations | Courtesy Jamsheed Marker

Ahmed. How did you get to know Liaquat Ali Khan?

Marker. Karachi was a small city and everybody knew everybody else. We happened to have a friendship with begum Ra’ana Liaquat Ali Khan and the prime minister.

People were trying to destroy what we had and were trying to see what they can get out of it. All those flatterers one day came to Liaquat Ali Khan and said, ‘Sir, you should have an Englishman as a military secretary. You should have those British ADCs (aide-de-camps). These are your entitlements. [The flatterers] didn’t think we had the capability of handling [those duties].

Liaquat Ali Khan said, ‘I’m the prime minister. I decide these matters. I don’t need this kind of privilege. If I put an Englishman there, it’ll be because I think that is what is needed for Pakistan. I’m not moved or impressed by these goras in their uniforms.’

Marker at the United Nations | Courtesy Jamsheed Marker

Ahmed. During the time of Quaid-e-Azam and Liaquat Ali Khan, the bureaucracy had started taking over the power of the state. How did that happen?

Marker. Liaquat Ali Khan was in complete command but he exercised his power in an exemplary fashion. He said, ‘There has to be a system and we have to work under that.’ If we had two or three people more like Liaquat Ali Khan, Pakistan would have seen it through. Our leaders saw Pakistan as an opportunity for themselves, not as an opportunity for the people or the country.

Jamsheed Marker (L) with Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto (R) | Courtesy Jamsheed Marker

Ahmed. When did you have your fist encounter with people in power?

Marker. It was in the late 1940s. I was in the naval selection board, working under the Government of India’s home department. Morarji Desai [who would become India’s prime minister later] was working as home minister [in the pre-Partition administration]. He came to inspect us in this small place called Porbandar near Pune. Our office used to be in an old Shivaji fort. [Desai] was Gujarati-speaking like me. He asked me what I thought of [independence]. In those days, we had Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs in our selection board so I told him to keep that intact but he said, ‘This will never go on because there is too much impartiality [in it].’ I asked why it couldn’t be done if there was will for it. He said we would have to find something better suited to the genius of our politicians than [to that of] our people.

He wanted me to work for him. He said to me, ‘What are your plans?’ I told him that I would go back to my home in Quetta as soon as I was released from the shackles of the government. My family was there and my business was there. My family had been living in Quetta for three generations. They had gone there with the British as contractors. He said, ‘Quetta might become Pakistan.’ I said, ‘Quetta will become Pakistan and I will go there. That is my intention.’

We had a family business of shipping and chemicals based in Keamari, Karachi. Right until 1952, I used to drive from Karachi to Quetta in my own car and I never experienced any security problems. We used to leave at around 10 pm, spend the night in Sukkur and go on to Sibi and then to Quetta. The whole journey was done by night because of the hot weather. We never feared anything. If there was ever any accident, 20 bus drivers would come along to help within 10 minutes. It was a totally different [environment].

“There was no concept of bribery at the time. Nobody could even think about it”

Ahmed. Who else were you in touch with among the leaders after Partition?

Marker. There was I I Chundrigar, Fazlur Rehman (the education minister), Khawaja Nazimuddin. They were all very dedicated people.

Marker with former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan | Courtesy Jamsheed Marker

Ahmed. There is this perception about Nazimuddin that he never allowed himself to act as governor general while Liaquat Ali Khan was alive.

Marker. They were all a team. They used to get together and work hard to solve the problems. Nazimuddin was not the brightest of them, but he was an honest and modest man. There was no concept of bribery at the time. Nobody could even think about it. Like I told you before, Liaquat Ali Khan refused all the honours and [forsook] all his properties. A lot of Hindus left their properties here during Partition and the same happened on the other side. There was a law about evacuee properties. The government appointed people to distribute those properties to the ones who didn’t have anything.

Ahmed. There are allegations that false claims were made to get evacuee properties. That is how the process of corruption started. Is it true?

Marker. Yes, it started [then] and Liaquat Ali Khan tried his best to shut it down. I remember we used to meet at his house for an informal lunch. He was a very punctual man. Everything had to be done according to schedule. The time for lunch was 1 pm, and we were there on time but he was late by about half an hour. Ra’ana Liaquat Ali Khan was angry with him. When he walked in, Ra’ana said, ‘It’s very shameful that you kept your guest waiting. How can you do something like that?’ Liaquat Ali Khan was normally a very polite and calm man and that was the first time, perhaps the only time, I saw him in a fury. He said, ‘You don’t know what has happened to me. These bureaucrats will finish us.’

We came to know later that the property department’s secretary had brought a file to him, trying to get his signature for the allotment of land to Liaquat Ali Khan himself. When asked about it, the secretary said, ‘These are your entitlements. These are, in fact, much less than what you should have gotten.’ Liaquat Ali Khan looked out of the window of the prime minister’s house at the slums which were all over the country at the time. He took the file and threw it across the room. ‘Look here, go and see those slums outside. Look at the condition of those poor people. When you have taken care of all of them and resettled them, then you bring this file to me.’

Jamsheed Marker (L) with Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto (R) | Courtesy Jamsheed Marker

Ahmed. How right was it for Pakistan to opt for joining the Western Bloc when Mohammad Ali Bogra was the prime minister, rather than adopting a non-aligned policy?

Marker. Everyone asks me this question. The answer is that, at the time, it was in our national interest to be friends with the Americans. The whole world was looking towards America because it was the only country with money. We beat the Indians to it. This was a great stroke of diplomacy. At the time, the Indians were furious that we had managed to secure the Americans first. [It] was a great success.

Ahmed. Don’t you think that a non-aligned policy would have been more useful for Pakistan?

Marker. Not under the circumstances then prevailing. The pressure from India was so great that this was the only way Pakistan could have stood up to the Indians.

Marker (far-left) and his wife (far-right) pose with Ronald and Nancy Reagan | Courtesy Jamsheed Marker

Ahmed. Was the Indian threat real or did we make more of it than was necessary?

Marker. The threat was real. [The Indians] made it quite clear that they were out to break Pakistan one way or the other, by hook or by crook. Every attempt was made to demolish and destroy Pakistan. [India would have attacked Pakistan] if Krishna Menon had been successful in bringing around [Pandit Jawaharlal] Nehru, and if the Chinese had not thrown the Indians out [in the 1962 war]. I mean, he was completely Nehru’s man and he was a rare, evil genius and a Rasputin. There were many Indian Rasputins but he was the chief Rasputin.

It was also due to Quaid-e-Azam’s obduracy that no Hindu engineer, civil servant or politician opted for Pakistan. Though many Hindus lived in East Pakistan, we did not mentally [accept them as Pakistanis]. That was the beginning of the struggle between East and West Pakistan. Here, two things happened. The first was when Jinnah said Urdu would be the national language of Pakistan. I think it was a major blunder. One of the few he has made.

“We behaved abnormally, with contempt, towards the Bengalis. It was a very difficult situation to begin with.”

It was a blunder which undid all the work that he had done for the creation [of Pakistan]. And then Miss [Fatima] Jinnah did the same kind of thing. [People in East Pakistan] were already in a very sensitive mood and there was already an attitude [in West Pakistan] of looking down upon the Bengalis. It was an attitude.

Once we were in Dhaka for a cricket match. I told all my friends to look at the enthusiasm of the crowd for the Pakistani team. I was in awe of that, with so many Bengalis [cheering for Pakistan]. But we did not have a single Bengali [player in our team]. It was the most colonial dismissal with which they said, ‘These Bengalis cannot play cricket.’ How the succession of [East] Bengal [from Pakistan happened] is another historical thing. Can you think of another country in which the majority secedes from the minority?

Ahmed. If this colonial mindset was there in the selection of the cricket team, don’t you think it was also there in the domains of politics and statecraft?

Marker. There was. We behaved abnormally, with contempt, towards the Bengalis. It was a very difficult situation to begin with. There was the issue of population [disparity], wherein the majority was being controlled by the minority. We never accepted [the Bengalis] wholeheartedly.

Ahmed. How do you look at the emergence of the military’s power in statecraft?

Marker. West Pakistan’s politicians brought it on themselves. They raised this tiger themselves and today we are facing the consequences of that. Before independence, it was very hard to find Muslim army officers. The senior ones were either Englishmen or Hindus. This tradition passed on after independence.

Marker with former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan | Courtesy Jamsheed Marker

Ahmed. You have been Pakistan’s ambassador in more countries than perhaps any other ambassador……

Marker. I always submitted my resignation each time the government changed … I was not in the [Foreign] Service so I did not have to hack my way to the top [to become an ambassador].

Marker with his wife | Courtesy Jamsheed Marker

Ahmed. In 1965, Pakistan had started gravitating towards China, and the United States had started to have a very sceptical view of Pakistan……

Marker. Yes, and the [Americans] bullied us like hell. They bullied us over India, telling us that India is a good country and is our neighbour and that we should be friends with it.

Ahmed. Who was the architect of Pakistan’s relations with China?

Marker. [Huseyn Shaheed] Suhrawardy, unquestionably. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto [came to it later], going around wearing those Mao caps.

Ahmed. But Suhrawardy remained prime minister for only thirteen months in 1956 and 1957.

Marker. What is important about [relations with China] is that it did not change, but it was only redirected [when Bhutto became foreign minister].

“It did [annoy the world] and the Indians exploited that. They said Pakistan had a slave’s mentality towards the West.”

Ahmed. What do you say about Suhrawardy’s position on the Suez Canal Crisis when he supported the West against Egypt?

Marker. He said the Arabs were zero plus zero plus zero and he was quite right. They were thoroughly useless.

Ahmed. But didn’t it annoy people around the world? Nationalistic feelings were on the rise at the time?

Marker. It did [annoy the world] and the Indians exploited that. They said Pakistan had a slave’s mentality towards the West.

Ahmed. In 1969, Bhutto wrote The Myth of Independence in which he observed that we went an extra mile to befriend the United States, yet the United States did not fully reciprocate. To what extent was his analysis correct?

Marker. Bhutto’s foreign policy for Pakistan was what was good for Bhutto. Deep down, he didn’t care about Pakistan … [Even when he was running a pro-China foreign policy], he was accumulating support and recognition for himself. He got that recognition, even from China that [felt], ‘He could be our man.’

Ahmed. But Bhutto was not the only person running the state. He remained foreign minister for not more than three years. I mean, Ayub Khan was there. The military establishment was there and both were more powerful than the foreign minister.

Marker. They were very fiercely supported by Bhutto because he knew that was where the power rested in Pakistan –– in the General Headquarters.

Marker (far-left) and his wife (far-right) pose with Ronald and Nancy Reagan | Courtesy Jamsheed Marker

Ahmed. Let’s move to the separation of East Pakistan. Who do you hold responsible for that?

Marker. It’s easy. There were three people: Yahya Khan, Bhutto and Shiekh Mujibur Rahman –– and each of them [for] his own reason. There’s no question about that.

Ahmed. Mujib was in Suhrawardy’s party so how did he become a breaker of Pakistan?

Marker. Because he had organised the Bengalis in the direction [of separation]. I was there when there was a fierce discussion between Mujibur Rahman and Suhrawardy [at an] informal get-together. Mujib attacked Suhrawardy and asked why he had accepted [electoral] parity [between the two wings of the country] in 1955. He said that East Pakistan had the majority and the power was all theirs to wield. He kept quoting the 1940 resolution — and correctly so as [to highlight the rights of East Pakistan].

I see no reason why, at the time, they could not have got together [to talk]. It would have worked, it would’ve been messy but there might not have been this horrible bloodshed.

Ahmed. Mujibur Rahman could have become the prime minister of all of Pakistan with the parliamentary majority he had.

Marker. I don’t think so. I think he was being maligned [so that he could not become the prime minister]. Although it was not horrible to think of him as our prime minister, but the kind of noise that was being made about him at the time was a wrong thing to do.

Ahmed. Do you think it would have been wrong if the country was given to him?

Marker. As long as he had maintained a coalition with the Baloch [political parties], that would have kept Pakistan together. A combination of Balochistan and [East] Bengal would have held Pakistan together. [But] Yahya was determined to remain in power and he had some assurance from Bhutto. Bhutto pursued [the idea that giving power to the Bengalis would upset the whole civil-military arrangement]. He realised that this was the only way in which he could have become the ruler of the country.

“The fact is that we surely used to have our relationship with China before [Bhutto] and afterwards, of course, it was Ziaul Haq [who took care of the nuclear programme].”

Ahmed. How do you look back at Bhutto’s tenure?

Marker. Three events turned the course of history in Pakistan. The first was Ayub Khan’s martial law which was entirely peaceful. People were happy. The second was when Bhutto came and changed the thinking of Pakistan. As a taxi driver in New York once told me, ‘Sir, he gave us our freedom to speak.’

And the third was Ziaul Haq’s [takeover of power]. He was a cold but patriotic man. Zia inflicted a lot of damage on Pakistan but he also stood up for our nuclear programme. If it weren’t for him and [Air Marshal] Nur Khan, [the nuclear programme] wouldn’t have been possible.

Ahmed. Wasn’t Bhutto the initiator of that programme?

Marker. That is what his soldiers claimed. He also claimed to be the initiator of relations with China. [Both] are key elements in the strengthening of Pakistan. But the fact is that we surely used to have our relationship with China before [Bhutto] and afterwards, of course, it was Ziaul Haq [who took care of the nuclear programme].

Ahmed. Coming back to my very first question, how do you look at Pakistan’s future? Marker. The people of Pakistan have been let down by political [leaders]. As long as that continues, we will continue to lurch. The other thing I am depressed about is that everyone feels that we ought to be friendly with India –– everyone except India. We have to stop this rivalry and avoid wasting resources [on it].

Ahmed. People talk about the Quaid’s speech of 1947 to argue that he envisaged a democratic, secular Pakistan. Do you think this is what our national narrative should be?

Marker. You can’t be talking of the 12th century at the present time and hope for it to be successful. There was this reception held at a banker’s conference during Ziaul Haq’s time where I asked a German how the conference was going. He said very badly. I said what happened and he said, ‘In the 20th century, we are talking of bringing banking procedures of the 14th century. We don’t see any benefit in it nor are we interested in it. If that’s the way you decide to go, then God help you.’

Marker with his wife | Courtesy Jamsheed Marker

Ahmed. If Ziaul Haq promoted religious fundamentalism, why do you give him credit for good things?

Marker. One good thing, for which I give him credit for more than any other, is that he stood up to the Americans on the nuclear issue. Pakistan was playing in the hands of the Americans and had agreed to become the front line state vis-a-vis Afghanistan. It was either the sagacity of Ziaul Haq or the Americans preferred to overlook it, but that enabled us to complete the nuclear plant. It was Ziaul Haq’s determination to take whatever the Americans would throw at him as long as he could [continue work on the plant]. The Americans were in no way going to kill us for that.

Ahmed. There is a narrative that flows from Quaid’s August 11 speech — that the state will have nothing to do with religious affiliations of the citizens. Then there is another narrative that flows from Ziaul Haq — that takes us to a theocratic Pakistan. Where do you think the future lies?

Marker. I think it’s one of Pakistan’s greatest misfortunes that we have been forced into this fundamentalist mindset. Nowif we’re talking in terms of democracy, you have to accept that we are being driven by the force [of popular will]. If we reject it, that will mean a conflict. There has to be popular consent. And I fear we are losing the battle [for that]. We are taking these poor people to the wrong path. [We should take them] towards the secular part of the narrative.

Ahmed. How do you recall your days as a cricket commentator, working alongside the late Omar Kureishi?

Marker. He was a great friend of mine. He brought cricket not only to Pakistan but spread it to South Asia. It is incongruous [with our culture]. It is not one of our instinctive national games. It is an expensive game.

Ahmed. If I were to ask you about the three greatest Pakistani cricketers, who would you name?

Marker. I’m not following cricket these days. [Abdul Hafeez] Kardar, Fazal Mahmood and Imtiaz Ahmed are my favourites and, oh yes, the Little Master [Hanif Mohammed] too.

I have been disappointed, I must say, [with how the game has evolved]. In the old classic days, the players went on to the field like white sparrows, not dressed like clowns.

Ahmed. Cricket is not just about sport, it is also about values. How do you assess its evolution in the context of values?

Marker. Values were bound to change because cricket has not been able to sustain itself in the present. Look at how county cricket has changed in England. Nobody has time now. Somebody asked Danny Kaye, the American humorist and actor, about his experience after he had been to Lords to see a cricket match. He said, ‘I have seen cricket, and I know it isn’t true.’

This article was originally published in the Herald’s March 2017 issue.

The writer is a professor of politics and history, and holds a PhD in social and political sciences.

My journey into the two wheeler world began in 1948 when my youngest uncle Shapoor bought a war- surplus Matchless 350 cc, with a rigid frame. I don’t remember if it had shock absorbers at the back, but there were definitely none in front. Due to the large extended families of the time, there was not much of an age difference between Shapoor and myself, and he very sweetly offered to teach me to ride.

Article By Rumi Taraporevala

The first perquisite was to get a temporary license. A tough job as I was not yet 18, looked like a ‘bachha’, weighed 115 pounds, with a small face. What to do? Though no age proof was mandatory at that time, one look at me and the inspector would have thrown me out on my ear. My childhood friend Minoo Nanavaty came to the rescue. Though we were more or less the same age, he had already developed into a strapping young man complete with mustache and beard. He volunteered to take the application form filled up by me, and presented himself at the police station as Rumi Taraporevala. Times were easy, the inspector took one look at him and passed my learner’s license. Hooray!

Shapoor took me in hand, was a good teacher and I was soon riding solo confidently. But, boy was the ride rough on that ancient bike! But it was like heaven for a young guy like me to be riding a motorcycle, like I was King of the Road..

I got my permanent license too without a problem. It was stamped “British India” on a red background – my proud possession. Whenever Shapoor was out of town he allowed me to use the bike, which had to be picked up from his house at Jaiji Terrace, Sleater Road where he lived with my grandmother. Minoo and I would walk over to Jaiji Terrace on Sundays, pick up the bike, ride around town for an hour or two and be back latest by 11 o’clock.

Then one fine day, in a more adventurous mood, we decided to take off for Juhu, had breakfast at the old Palm Grove Hotel, ogled the girls, and finally returned to Jaiji Terrace two hours later than normal. The old lady was anxiously waiting for our arrival on the balcony, not knowing whether we had wrecked her youngest son’s hard earned bike, or if we ourselves had landed up folded into a lamp post. Soon as I parked the bike, half leaning out of the balcony in her “budyan” Bapaiji, livid, started yelling at the top of her voice “khaa gella, ghano kharab chokro che, atter gheri ooper aav” – where were you chaps, you are a very bad boy, come up immediately. Coward that I was, I gracefully declined her kind invitation to go up for her favorite mode of punishment, to be pinched so hard by her long bony fingers that it would raise a blue welt in the area of her attack.

Then there was the time in college, where Dinshaw Boga, family friend and dentist in later life, had a BSA 250cc bike. He was 2 years ahead of us, was attending a lecture when we had none, so Minoo and I decided to go for a ride on his bike. During those years there were no starting keys or buttons, you just opened the petrol cock, kick-started the vehicle, and off you went. But, sometimes those babies turned temperamental, and gave you a solid kick right back which was bloody painful. And the location of batteries as they were placed in those bikes, and the leakage of battery water, resulted in small holes on the left side of all our trousers from the knee down.

When we returned to college friend Boga, justifiably furious, was waiting for us and threatened to send a letter of complaint to my parents. I stayed home the next day hovering near the door for just this eventuality. The doorbell rang, I immediately opened the door to find Dinshaw’s man with the letter addressed to my parents. I made him wait at the door, returned after 5 minutes having torn the letter in the meantime, with a message to Dinshaw from my mother saying that the matter would be attended to. Though as a child I used to get quite a whacking from my dear mum Aloo for various transgressions, I could always “pattao’ her. Aderji my dad however, of the fiery temperament, was quite a different cup of tea, and would have taken a rather dim view of the proceedings. Dinshaw, in later life, was my dentist and friend, and we used to laugh over this incident.

Another person to own a motorbike in the late 40’s and 50’s, was Homi Lala our scout master in school, good friend, and later founder of the famous Lala Tours. He would be out of town frequently, and used to leave his AJS 350cc with Minoo at his bungalow at Club Back Road, with instructions to allow me to use the bike. My friend Jasi and I would pick up the bike every evening during our holidays and head to Marine Drive, where we used to show off with fast circles around the islands at steep angles, to impress the girls of course, till one day a hulking big motorcycle cop hauled me up and asked me ‘have you got a license’? Yes sir, I said. Is it a juvenile license? No sir, I said. He took a look at my license, looked me up and down incredulously, as if to say that they are giving driving licenses to babies now, and let me off with a stern ‘Drive carefully!!! Yes sir, I said! And I did just that thereafter – no more showing off.

Falling off a motorcycle is the easiest thing in the world! Riding along Lamington Road with Jasi during the very first rain of the monsoon, I had to brake suddenly and the bike slid off in one direction, Jasi and I in another. There were a bunch of Parsi Dairy Farm bhaiyas, with their handis by the side of the road and instead of helping us up, started laughing and applauding wildly, as if they had just witnessed some great comedy act. Bastards! No harm done to us or the bike, and I learnt a lesson which has stayed with me all my life. During the very first rain of the monsoon, never brake sharply on a bike or in a car, as there is a lot of muck, dirt, oil sometimes, accumulated on our very ‘clean’ roads pre-monsoon.

After my daughter Sooni and her cousin Minoo were born 4 days’ apart in January 1957, my wife Freny’s parents took a bungalow on hire in Khandala for the summer season. Pesi, my brother-in-law, and I used to go up by train during week-ends to visit the kids. He was unable to do the trip one weekend, so I decided to borrow a Triumph Tiger Cub 250cc belonging to my cousin Minoo Manekshaw, and go up solo on the old Bombay/Poona two lane road. Coming upon a series of sharp bends and curves, I fortunately slowed down considerably, but fell asleep if you please. The next thing I knew was lying in the soft dirt by the side of the road, totally unharmed, with no damage done to the bike either. Someone up there was looking out for me! Then up to Khandala as if nothing had happened. Had my father-in-law heard of this incident, he would immediately have impounded the bike in Khandala, and sent me packing by the next train to Bombay.

From 1948 till 1960 all the bikes I rode were on a beg, borrow, and yes steal basis, as I had no money to buy one of my own. Then in 1960, cheap Italian scooters mainly Vespa and Lambretta started coming in the market, and I was finally the proud owner of a Vespa bought for all of Rs. 2,600. Fun days ensued, with most of my crowd from the Xaviers’ school, scouts and college following suit.. Manekshaw, too got rid of his BSA and bought a Vespa. His wife Rutty was my mum’s first cousin, but again due to the extended families of the time, was our age, much loved “aunt”, and friend. One fine day Minoo and I had a brilliant brainwave that we should do a scooter tour of South India. “Karkkas” that we were, we opened a recurring deposit for just this project. And finally, when we had saved Rs. 1,000/- each between the four of us, the time was ripe to start on our epic adventure. We got a whole series of road maps from the WIAA, bought some travelers’ cheques from SBI, made arrangements for Sooni then 9, and their son Mehernosh 11, to be looked after by the respective grandparents, and finally embarked on our “musaffri” in February 1966.

The plan was to take the scooters by train to Cochin, then ride up to Bombay visiting various places en route. On the day of our departure, we had to check in the scooters at VT in the morning, for subsequent loading into the brake-van of our train leaving in the evening. On reaching VT we were told to empty all the petrol before they would even consider letting the vehicles into the station. We bought a rubber pipe from outside, and set to doing the job by sticking one end into the petrol tank, and sucking at the other to allow the petrol to drain out in a gutter.

Manekshaw did a professional job and when it was my turn with the pipe, I gave it a hard suck as if I was having a particularly tasty milkshake, and was rewarded with a mouthful of petrol. Amateur hour! The taste of petrol stayed in my mouth for hours. We left in the evening with a huge crowd of relatives and friends seeing us off with food, fond farewells, drive carefully, look after yourselves etc. Sooni then 9, was particularly happy with our departure as she could then run rings around her grandparents regarding never having any homework. We were traveling royal class of course – nothing but the best for us! The next day at some wayside station, the guard changed and the new guy decided to unload our scooters from the brake van on some pretext or the other. Minoo Manekshaw, the ultimate salesman (it was his profession) persuaded the guard to reverse his decision, and bribed him with just 1 packet of banana chips – “in that case, you may load” was his classic response.

We reached Cochin in the morning of the 3rd day in train, downloaded the scooters from the brake van, hired a rickshaw for our personal luggage, dragged the scooters to the nearest pump and filled our tanks to the brim. We checked into a cheap hotel, settled down, and in the evening, we headed for the Hotel Malabar for just 1 drink, to take in the lovely ambience of the place – sitting in the bar was a pleasure watching the big ships plying to and fro.

Our trip started in earnest the next day when we loaded our luggage for the first time onto the scooters. It took us an hour or so do the job to our satisfaction. A big zipper on the stand in front of the scooter, strapped on the inside portion, a black plastic bag for things needed en route, a small bag between my feet for the same purpose, a small flat bag between the double seat and the stepney mainly as a cushion for Freny’s back, & a proper medium size suitcase, fitted on the stand right at the back, to give us all the comforts of home.

The luggage on my scooter weighed around 60lbs, added to Freny’s weight of around 110lbs, and mine at say 125lbs, added to a total of 295lbs, which the 150cc Vespa hauled smoothly up the steep ghats to reach Kody and Ooty at altitudes of 8,000 ft., without a hiccup or a murmur – way to go Vespa, baby!

First on the agenda was the Peermade Tea Estate, about half a day’s drive from Cochin, where my cousin Pheroze Sethna was the Manager. We spent a couple of pleasant, peaceful days at the estate enjoying Pheroze’s hospitality, after which we left for the Periyar Game Sanctuary at Thekkady. Then off to Kody, via Coimbatore, the highlight of our trip. We checked into the English Club, which fortunately was open to guests, for a most delightful holiday. A roaring fire in the rooms at night, a delightful experience for us Bombay wallas. where we had our drinks staring into the flames all the while, and with crispy bacon and eggs for breakfast. What more could anyone ask for, and that too at a pittance considering the place. Time to say farewell, and clad in heavy woolies we pushed off early one morning for our next halt, Ooty. Being at those altitudes, and winter to boot, it was freezing cold to travel on the scooters. We had to be properly clad in heavy woolies, till we reached the plains where it was blazing hot. A quick striptease by the road side, into our summer t-shirts and shorts, and we’d be on our way again.

Before we reached the plains however, my scooter was surrounded by a big bunch of cows, one of which took a particular dislike to the put-put sound of my vehicle. After some rumination, she decided she had had enough, put her head down and came straight for us – my good old Vespa’s acceleration, soon zoomed us out of trouble. We stayed for a couple of enjoyable days in Ooty then pushed off for Mysore, with an overnight halt at the Bandipur Game Sanctuary. During our travels in the South, we ran out of dough at a place called Utthampaliyam, where we stopped for a bite to eat. Between the four of us we could muster only11 annas (16 annas made a rupee in those days) just enough to buy a couple of nariel pannis.

We were sure of not finding a branch of SBI in that little place to cash our travelers cheques.. Talking among ourselves a local heard us mention SBI, and immediately chipped in “saar you want SBI, I take”. The agent in that little hole in the wall, wanted to see our passports if you please, to cash our measly 400 bucks or whatever we wanted. We were not carrying passports. We did not even possess any. I blew up saying we were all Indian citizens, so why the hell did he need our passports. When I started spouting names of the manager and his deputy in the Bombay main office, with whom we had business connections, our friend immediately changed his tune, let us have what we wanted, and saw us off at the door.

So, the days passed! From Mysore, we went to Bangalore, then off to Hyderabad for the final stop our trip. The 2 group pictures from the Parsi Dharamsala where we were staying, show the tan we had all put on in the hot, hot plains of South India. From Hyderabad, we halted overnight at Sholapur for our final, and longest lap to Bombay where we were warmly received by family and friends, glad to see us return in one piece.

Traveling by road in South India in 1966 we had no complaints. Even in the cheapest of hotels where we usually put up – cleanliness was the order of the day, with clean white bed-sheets, and spotless bathrooms. The people were friendly, most spoke English and were eager to please. The roads were good, truckers were well mannered, amiable, and with a little toot from our squeaky horns, allowed us to pass with a friendly wave of the hand. Not too sure, but we clocked around 2,700 kms from Coimbatore to Bombay, and, I promise you, did not spend more than Rs. 1,000/- each on the entire trip. Those were the days my friends!

I sold the scooter which had taken us so flawlessly around South India in 1970, bought another Vespa which gave me the same reliable service till 1990. And, finally, at the age of 60, I decided to call it a day on my super, enjoyable, lovely days on two wheels.

As Satchmo said at the finish of the movie True Love, “END OF STORY”!!!

The above article was originally published on Facebook, and has been reproduced here with permission of the author.

Following in the footsteps of Jyoti Sagar, J. Sagar Associates’ Senior Partner Berjis Desai retired from the firm on March 31 this year. Having followed the firm’s retirement policy, the senior partners have walked the talk. In 2013, Jyoti Sagar, the founding partner retired from the firm, giving away all his equity. Although Jyoti continues to be the Chairman and Mentor of the firm, Berjis will no longer be connected with JSA.

Interview by Pallavi Saluja, barandbench.com

Jyoti and Berjis were introduced to each other through a common friend about 15 years ago. Remembering his first meeting with Jyoti, Berjis in an earlier interview with Bar & Bench, said,

“Within 15 minutes of our meeting, we had agreed on the commercial terms and we realized that we had several principles, which were very common and that is why we got together”.

On April 1, 2003 Berjis along with his team of 15 lawyers joined the firm.

After 14 years, Berjis would sever all his ties with the firm.

On April 1, 2017, one day after his retirement, Berjis is already sitting in his new office, working for his clients. In this interview with Bar & Bench’s Pallavi Saluja, Berjis talks about his professional plan post retirement, future of JSA and law firms in general.

It’s just been a day since you retired. How does it feel?

I haven’t got much time to think about it because I am already sitting in my new office. I have been working since 9.30 am. I have just moved from one place to another.

What are your plans for the new office?

I am not setting up any law firm or retaining any lawyers. I will focus on private client practice – advising promoter family, trust planning, will, succession planning, family disputes, something that I have been doing for last several years. I will also do fast track commercial arbitration where I will act as an arbitrator.

I will develop a totally independent arm’s length relationship with all the law firms. As and when any advice is required, I will provide the consultation and that is the kind of practice I want to build. It is retirement from JSA but not retirement from the profession.

Apart from focusing on private client practice, what do you plan to do, since you no longer have to manage a large law firm?

I have been wanting to do some serious writing; both fiction and non-fiction. I have some unpublished fiction, which I hope to publish in a reasonable time.

The firm has seen some big exits in the past two years. How has it affected the firm and what steps have been taken to retain the firm’s talent?

So the exits effectively were only two – Akshay Chudasama and Somasekhar Sundaresan, which were unplanned exits. And undoubtedly both of them are star players. As far as my exit is concerned, it was a planned exit, everybody knew that I was going to retire on March 31, 2017.

I have always said, Akshay and Som’s exit was a loss to the firm; there is no two ways about it. But these are times when there is intense churn – particularly in Bombay – in all the large law firms, so JSA has also been a party to it. At the Equity Partner level, effectively it has been these two exits and of course now recently two equity partners – Sumanto Basu and Pallavi Bedi, who were essentially part of the project practice, have left.

So apart from that, the Firm has had a very good year. As a matter of fact, without going too much into detail, it is the best year of its 25 years – in terms of both revenue and profits. But, in terms of these two guys and other exits, to say that there is no loss is obviously not true. This is part of life now and everyone should become used to it and I think in next one and half years, there will be a further churn in the legal profession as such.

Amit Kapur has taken over as senior partner and the firm already has joint managing partners. How does this all fit in the organisation? What is the role of the senior partner?

The senior partner’s role is a work in progress; he has just taken over today, but the role and responsibilities are being worked out. It will be done in a manner in which it does not undermine the joint managing partners. But at the same time, the senior partner is in-charge of strategy and vision essentially.

It’s the same on western lines, where you have a managing partner and the senior partner and each has its role to play. So in a smaller setup, they will be looking after some aspect of management or the other. Amit is a great lawyer, a great resource and I am sure he is going to do a great job.

In our earlier Interview with you and Jyoti, you had said, “We are no longer there even in the mentoring role, then the challenge will come whether the institution is durable.” So what are your thoughts on that now?

He still continues to be the Chairman of the firm. Mr. Sagar has a mentoring role, which he is discharging. At the moment, though he may not be a partner, but he certainly is the brand equity of the firm, the mascot of the firm so to say. He has a lot to contribute as and when issues arise both internally and externally.

I am of course going to be now completely independent of any law firm including JSA. It is severance in the true sense. I am an independent practitioner not having any kind of direct, indirect consultancy with any law firm because that is what I want to shape the practice as such.

What is the future direction of JSA and the path of the legacy you are leaving behind?

I would say that JSA has been an experiment to a large extent and Jyoti’s vision has been far ahead of his times – no family controls, no dominant individual controls, there is a retirement age and people have walked the talk mostly. It’s a unique experiment. The firm has completed 25 years and this year has been the best so far in terms of revenue and profits.

At the same time, there are challenges as to how the next generation of management works out their internal dynamics and learns how to peacefully co-exist in the absence of the founder partners, who had ingrained moral authority and persuasive authority. That advantage is not available to the new generation of managers who will take over. So they have to work for internal dynamics, they have to do their ego management, aspiration management – which may lead to some conflict.

How do you overcome that conflict and how do you put the firm before yourself?

As I have repeatedly said, the essence of managing a large law firm is that you have to be an excellent ego manager. Your IQ may be poor but your EQ should be very high in order to really bind people together, that is a very rare commodity.

Everybody is becoming aspirationally very aggressive. Earlier, people were more docile, so now to manage all that, to keep everyone blended together, to make them think of the institution, there is where the challenge lies. These challenges are even being felt by family-owned firms. Those days are gone where a senior partner will not challenge the authority of the family owner of the firm. That’s happening all the time.

What do you have to say on the recent trend of law firm partners leaving firms for counsel practice? Will we see more of this in the future?

I think this distinction between counsels is of course only on the original side. And increasingly, this so-called informal distinction between counsel and other lawyers is slowly and gradually being eroded. Zerick Dastur, for instance, will be filing a vakalatnama undoubtedly, but at the same time he will also be arguing a lot on his own and maybe over a period of time his aspiration is to become an independent counsel.

On the other hand, Som’s model is that he is a completely independent counsel. He has no links with anybody, directly or indirectly, and he does not file any vakalatnama. He is like any other counsel on the original side. These are all different models which are developing. I think the same goes for Rohan also.

For everybody from the transactional side to gravitate to this, it’s not easy. But yes, I suppose that the answer is that we may see more of this trend. I understand most of the people on the regulatory litigation side are doing a lot of arguing themselves. For example, Amit Kapoor regularly appears in the Supreme Court and actually argues on various aspects even when other senior counsels are present.

So for somebody like him to transition to independent counsel practice is extremely easy. And even the hybrid model as I said about Zerick, where you file the vakalatnama, you interact with the client as well as you argue yourself. Those type of boutique practices which combines the traditional advocate on record practice/solicitor practice along with counsel practice is also highly cost efficient to the client. So this can be a trend setter.

What are your thoughts on the entry of foreign law firms and future of Indian law firms?

I still continue to believe that foreign law firms are not going to set up here in a hurry and that international commercial arbitration and ‘fly in and fly out’ business will go on. But as far as actual setting up a firm, I still feel that day is about 5 years away or maybe more.

I think, a foreign firm setting up a full-fledged transactional law practice, is still far away for variety of reasons and it’s not only the regularity barriers. I feel that some of the foreign firms come here and see the ground reality; they realise that they have to bring in their own processes to do risk management and that is going to cost a lot of money. They have to have a very long term radar to absorb losses as they go around. So only people with a very strong appetite, like American law firms, who don’t mind not breaking even for 5-7 years may set up.

And I think that some of these foreign law firms will look increasingly at the surrogate model. As we know, a couple of surrogate model firms are already there in the market. I think you will see an addition in this financial year, maybe a couple more.

I think the future of Indian law firms will continue to have a rationale to exist when foreign law firms are fully set up. They will throw a lot of top talent to them, which will be a challenge for the Indian law firms as and when it happens. And Indian law firms will have to compete with risk management process, quality control, the excellence of the product, which I have always said, we are still light years away from and have a lot of catching up has to do.

As the Indian client also gets accustomed to a far superior product, it will slowly obviously require a more expensive set up. And that will be the challenge. So as I said, there will be a lot of churn and it’s not that Indian law firms will simply vanish from the market or simply cease to exist, but things will not be the same as it has been for the last many years.

Any advice for young lawyers?

There is humongous scope for young lawyers and two things are very important; one is humility and secondly, some patience and ability to sacrifice the short term for the long term and to build evolving professional partnerships and relationships. People are too anxious and impatient to reach a certain point. That impatience has to be curbed.

Times have come when you are going to see greater quality control, better processes, the whole quality of the law product will change quite radically. The pressure is already on in many ways, because it’s not only the foreign law firms, the Big Four accounting firms and tax consulting firms are also directly and indirectly doing a lot of M&A work. They are bringing a huge amount of value add to the table because they look at the transaction from a holistic point of tax, accounting, consultancy and legal. The kind of value add they do, clients are beginning to gravitate to them. Plus there are these huge in-house legal departments headed by general counsels doing majority of the work in-house. These are all huge challenges for all traditional Indian law firms, but I am sure people will survive, and a new order will always emerge.

Parsi revue Laughter in the House 2 is a cornucopia of guilty pleasures

One would perhaps not have imagined the Bee Gees song ‘Stayin’ Alive’ to be as felicitous to the boulevards of Ballard Estate, as it may have been to surviving in the rough streets of New York in 1977. The disco beats of this very song provides us with a rousing entrée to the Parsi revue Laughter in the House 2. A lifetime can be akin to a big bad city, the lyrics seem to allude, pointing to the never-say-die tenacity of director Sam Kerawalla and his worthy troupe of mostly octogenarian actors. In 2012, these intrepid veterans from the salad days of Parsi theatre had teamed up for the show’s first iteration, after 25 years away from the arclights, to pay tribute to Parsi theatre pioneer Adi Pherozeshah Marzban, on his 98th birth anniversary. This year they’ve staged an encore, with an ensemble of younger actors thrown into the mix. All of them take the stage to shake a leg to the Bee Gees hit, before they segue into a rendition of the opening number, ‘Haso hahahaha’, a clarion call for an evening of unmitigated fun, and on cue, the audience of mostly Parsi theatre-goers joins in readily.

Article by Vikram Phukan | The Hindu

Item numbers

In the grand tradition of Marzban’s variety shows of yore, Laughter in the House 2 strings together a cornucopia of guilty pleasures. There are comedic set-pieces more than a little reliant on innuendo, live crooning of international chart-busters and even Bollywood-style dancing to Hindi numbers. The master of ceremonies is the good-humoured Jim Vimadalal, who is neither full of himself like compères are wont to be, nor insecure about being upstaged by the main act, although he does preface each ‘item’ with some harmless ribbing at the performer about to gingerly step into the limelight. He starts off with exhorting “all young people below the age of 90” to clap and sing along to Simon and Garfunkel’s 1970 hit, ‘Cecilia’; music from a time when the senior actors were perhaps as old as today’s millennials, reminding us of the shifting signposts of youth, its cycles and rhythms.

Later, an effete Danesh Khambata, replete with pink shirt and fedora, spins off Karan Johar to deliver ‘Falooda with Farrokh’, a skit full of anachronistic humour that strangely doesn’t feel out of place in an evening that straddles generations in which political correctness can be thrown to the wind, but only just. In the most pedestrian moments, it is as if too much has been made out of punchlines that are merely comme ci, comme ça. But sometimes, the gags have bite like Bharat Dhabolkar’s skit ‘Cricket With Parsi Women’, featuring a wonderful Ruby Patel who cuts a figure that’s both refined and irreverent, mixing up cricketing terms with references associated with the Parsi zeitgeist, to raucous laughter in the ranks. The crests and troughs come with the territory of a revue that is expected to flow with a certain pace, reining in the audience one moment, cutting them loose the next. The audience is certainly indiscriminate with its applause, but never compulsively so. It’s the magic pull of a common tongue (Gujarati) and a shared culture that is so seductive. The uninitiated may recognise the resonances only by proxy, reacting to the reactions, and still be caught up in the sway.

Community pride

There is a beautiful moment post-interval when Hormudz Ragina induces the audience to sing along to Elvis Presley’s ‘Can’t Help Falling in Love’, and everyone joins in. In the auditorium, it is intriguingly the female voices that brim to the surface. The women are perhaps all mezzo-sopranos in the making, and occasional refrains from men pierce through the soft cadences that swathe the hall. It is certainly an accidental testament to a community’s egalitarianism, and the place its women have, and the pop ballad’s themes of kinship and relatedness come alive to the touch.

This is indeed a collective experience that is filled with uplift as well as self-deprecation — jokes about the dwindling population of Parsis pepper the evening. The 2011 census had pegged the Parsi population to 57,264. One of the ads of the government’s Jiyo Parsi campaign read, “Isn’t it time you broke up with your mum?” To a community famous for laughing at itself these are salvos that are not quite offensive. When Pharrell William’s soul anthem, ‘Happy’, gets re-invented as ‘I am Parsi’, and sali boti and dhansak are used to complete rhymes, there is a sense that this is what community pride should feel like despite the law of diminishing returns that seemingly besets its citizenry. During an interaction, someone in the audience wins a copy of Laughter in The House: 20th-Century Parsi Theatre, the 2011 book by Meher Marfatia with photographer Sooni Taraporevala, that gave the show its name.

Far from ageist

It must be said that senior actors on the Indian stage are like pink elephants or blue unicorns, often existing purely in the realm of the apocryphal. Theatre is a decidedly young industry. Many acting ensembles quite frequently feature budding young talent, eager to pay their dues on the hallowed altar of the playhouse before gambolling across to the greener pastures of celluloid where they would ostensibly live out their prime. Yet, there isn’t that much of a lacunae in terms of elderly characters on stage, when it comes to scripted drama.

In Abhishek Majumdar’s recent plays, Kaumudi and Muktidham, fraying protagonists wither and slowly ebb away, ready to pass on the baton to the next generation. Makrand Deshpande’s plays, like Miss Beautiful and Kadodon Mein Ek, pay tender homage to the exquisite degeneration that arrives with age, a preoccupation that finds echoes in Arghya Lahiri’s Wild Track. It is usually younger actors who take on these parts, acquiring instant venerability with frazzled hair or shuffling gait, even if their work is not entirely without gravitas. In fact, quite often, they are able to deliver veritable tour-de-forces, perhaps because of the manifold layers that must be peeled through simply to arrive at the truth of a character who has actually lived through a lifetime. This is why greying parts on stage are so much more coveted by actors of all ages, than in film, where it carries the charge of typecasting or stretches incredulity if the casting isn’t age-appropriate.

In Laughter in the House 2, when the authentically grey-haired take centre stage, they bring a certain peerless timelessness with them. Patel and her husband, Burjor, are both in their eighties, and had started out with Marzban’s uproarious Gujarati comedies in the heady 1960s, before chalking up illustrious careers in theatre and beyond. Singing star Bomi Dotiwala is now 80, and the irrepressible Moti Antia, 82. Relatively a spring chicken, Dinyar Contractor is just 71, and nimbly shuffles in and out of the show in a wheelchair as if it were a magic carpet. In conversation with Vimadalal, Contractor provides the evening its pièce de résistance turn, a wonderfully rambling rigmalore full of pithy, observational humour.

The personas the actors inhabit are that of habitual complainers, but it is always good-natured and they never come across as insufferable. There is a certain zest to their machinations, a certain humanity to their feigned cantankerousness, and a certain conviction to their beliefs even if they are considered to be set in their ways. Their ageing bodies, that gracefully sidestep any altercations with the stage and its props, remind us of what has been so egregiously made invisible on the Indian stage.

Passing on the baton

It’s not just a sense of history, it is a sense of what they are experiencing ‘in the now’ that is still so rich and textured. During an electrifying Antakshri sequence, it is heartening to watch youngsters like Khambata or Ragina or Shanaya Boyce, being so respectful and protective of the legends in their midst. The baton seems to be passing on to the right hands, but not necessarily in terms of entertainment. Tastes have irrevocably changed, and sometimes nostalgia brings us in touch with a foregone artistry.

Even with all the jokes about the shrinking Parsi populace, the irony of their own personal mortality is something that the actors stare in the face with an almost sanguine stoicism. The playbill lists three stalwarts from the 2012 edition who are no more with us — Marzban regulars Villoo Panthaky Kapadia and Rohinton Mody, and conductor Marazban Mehta. Two days before this performance, one of its prized performers, Dolly Dotiwala, beloved wife of Bomi, also passed on, her vivacious performance during an earlier dress rehearsal standing in as de facto swan song. As the performance winds down, the entire cast joins Bomi in paying tribute to her as he sings one of Marzban’s most soulful numbers, ‘Tehmina’. The adage goes, the show must go on. This certainly rings true loud and clear now more than ever.

This performance of Laughter in the House 2 took place at the NCPA on February 19 this year; another show is scheduled on April 16, at the Tata Theatre, NCPA at 7 p.m.

The author is a playwright and stage critic

Chinese Roots And Silk Routes

“People tend to forget that it is not just a craft, but also a visual identifier of the Zoroastrian community and its achievements,” says Ashdeen Z. Lilaowala of eponymous label Ashdeen, who has been working for over a decade to contemporise the Parsi gara.

Article by Tina Dastur | VERVE

It was the best of times for the Parsis in the 19th century, when men travelled from India to the Far East to trade in opium, returning home with artistically embroidered, hand-spun silk as gifts for women. Such were the beginnings of gara, which today is the community’s most striking inheritance. Dipping into its backstory, New Delhi-based Lilaowala says, “It is not as black and white as it is made out to be because there was a lot of cultural exchange that transpired. While Parsis did go to China during the Raj, there was also a lot of refining of the craft that took place in India. For example, they chose to adapt it, not for Chinese gowns or European clothes, but the sari. Also, Parsis had wealth coming in from trade and they wanted to create an identity for themselves.”

The Birds and the Trees

Besides being an Indo-China hybrid, the embroidery is multicultural in form. While inspiration from the Orient resulted in motifs such as the china-chini (Chinese man and woman), divine fungus, weeping willows, pagodas and cranes, its Indian influences took the shape of peacocks and lotuses. Persian designs were also ubiquitous via the paisley, gul-e-bulbul and simurgh (bird of paradise) as were the British symbols of baskets, bows and scallops. Given the community’s binding relationship with nature, floral motifs too adorn almost all saris, as do religious ones such as the fish and rooster. Lilaowala’s clothes and accessories are replete with chrysanthemums, peonies, roses and cherry blossoms, addressing the deep reverance for nature among Zoroastrians.

Knots and Know-how

Asal na garas or authentic garas came strictly in hues of purple, maroon and navy and were ornately embroidered with silk floss (mainly in ivory), which lent the embroidery its subtle sheen. Famously described as ‘painting with a needle’, the technique employed the satin stitch, aari or mochi stitch, petit point stitch and the devastatingly intricate French knots or khakha stitch. Even though Lilaowala uses khakha in his designs, he restricts its application to certain elements because “it doesn’t make commercial sense to use it to make full borders — it would be too expensive”. Depending on the elaborateness of the design and type of sari, a hand-stitched gara could take between two to nine months to create, which is also why they are considered heirloom-worthy.

Painstaking as the stitching may be and time-consuming though the process, Lilaowala insists that the real challenge lies in training the craftspeople. “What’s most difficult is getting them to understand what the embroidery is all about, because it is very figurative. It’s about creating exact forms and figures. And then of course, retaining the artisans. Losing good talent is always a concern,” he states.

Contemporary Canvases

Today, the gara is conspicuous in its presence at Parsi weddings and navjotes (Zoroastrian investiture ceremony), but that hasn’t always been the case. While the craft enjoyed its heyday from the 1850s to the 1920s, its popularity declined in the 1930s due to the communist upheavals in China and the khadi movement in India. Almost 50 years later, the late Naju Daver pioneered its revival. More recently, the New Delhi-based UNESCO Parzor Foundation has been making commendable efforts to bring back the lost glory of the embroidery while online apparel retailer Patine has been giving the technique a modern twist via its blouses, jackets and dresses in silk chiffon and georgette fabrics. Lilaowala, too, has expanded its application to lehngas, tunics, shawls and clutches in contemporary hues of turquoise, emerald, lime green and fuchsia, even experimenting with net. While many dispute this dilution, the designer reasons, “The fact is that the craft grew from an amalgam; it wasn’t something that existed since the beginning of time. So who is to define what an original gara is? I have no issues with machine-made versions as I believe that there is a place for everything. The most important thing is keeping the aesthetic intact.”

Despite fewer people investing in handcrafted garas because of the staggering prices they command, Lilaowala maintains that, “The main thing is patronage, and people are slowly developing an appreciation and realising that it is all about hand work. And so, I have no doubts that it will live on.”

Care For Your Wear

“The best way to look after your garas is to wear them! It is a disservice to let them lie idle. In between wears, periodically air your garment to allow the fabric to breathe.”