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| All it takes is one drop of poison |
See Rest Of Book Review (Here)
From: Luhrmann, T.M. "The Good Parsi: The fate of a colonial elite in a postcolonial society". Harvard University Press, 1996
Page 47
"If you look into the core of a Zoroastrian hart, most Zoroastrians really feel like strangers in India." The woman was explaining to me why I was not allowed into a fire temple, and went on to describe how my bodily vibrations would be damaged by the great purity and power of the temple fire. "I never felt like an Indian," an upper-middle-class woman explained. Like most Parsis (and elite Indians), she went on to say, she went to the best school her parents could afford. It was an English school, probably a convent school—many Indians attend schools runs by Catholic nuns and Jesuit priests—and she grew up on Jack and Jill, western comic books, and eventually Wordsworth, Byron, and Shelley. She never listened to Indian music—she couldn't understand it, she said—but she developed a taste for Tchaikovsky; she learned to ride and was known for her seat on a horse. She had felt nostalgic for the Lake District before she ever left India. But when she finally went to the Lake District, she said, it didn't touch her. It wasn't her country, and she found this confusing. In India, she said, Parsis are very pale. They feel superior to that Indians, and they do not feel Indian. ,when I went to Britain," she said, "suddenly I had a dark skin and I was foreign. We are like the Jews," she said. "They have Israel, we have Persia and the Shahnameh. Our loyalties are directed towards our ancient home-land." "Never believe a Parsi who tells you that he is Indian first and Parsi second," another young woman told me over tea.
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