Parsis more easily than Hindus describe India as dirty and a slum - Book Review: The Good Parsi

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All it takes is one drop of poison

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From: Luhrmann, T.M. "The Good Parsi: The fate of a colonial elite in a postcolonial society". Harvard University Press, 1996

Pages 47-48

Compared to my Hindu friends, Parsis seemed to me more comfortable with criticizing India, more at ease in deriding the poverty, the dirt, the noise, and the corruption that is so much of urban India. Many Parsis told me that the dynamic, successful Parsis had all emigrated. An eminent senior journalist told me that his vision of the community was of young men and women growing up in America. Many of them have grown up in America and elsewhere; 22 percent of Parsi families surveyed in a 1982. study reported that they had family members who lived abroad (Karkal 1984). Despite the fact that many middle-class Indians boil their water, several People spontaneously described the Parsi refusal to drink unpurified Indian water as an index of their stance towards India—and roundly declared that India and Bombay were falling apart. When I told my Brahmin friend that my father was coming to visit, she exclaimed, "how lovely, where will you take him"? while a Parsi remarked, "that's wonderful, but I hoped you've warned him. I always feel," she said, "that westerners should be prepared before they come to India." 

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