A ZOROASTRIAN LADY CONQUERS EVEREST.
“Morning has broken
It’s a new day”
Prayers when recited
Keep ugliness at bay
Food is for the body
Prayers is for the soul
One withou the other
Can’t keep a person whole
“No fire or coal
So hotly glow
As the secret love
Of which no one knows”
When the Prayers begin to flow
I am remembered to trudge
The Path of straight & narrow
When I pray
My heart begins to sing
As they are like the
“Wind beneath my wings”
“Lean on me”
That’s what Prayers
Seem to say:
We’ll take all
Tears sadness & blues
Out of your way
Whatever I have done & said
I do my best
‘Cause I know the
Power of Prayers
Takes care of the rest.
………………………………Farida Bam
Dear Donors, Friends, Well Wishers,
Please visit www.wzotrust.org and see the 37 photographs in the section “WZO Trusts at work – 2015”. Whatever has been done has been possible only because of the support of donors, good wishes of friends and well wishers, and not to forget the commitment and dedication of the hard work put in by my colleagues and staff.
Thank you all for your continued support.
Dinshaw K. Tamboly
Ranting about what we know about GM food and soya at Abergavenny Food Festival, September 2012
Navroz Dabu prepares for an upcoming Hamlet set design by building miniature models in his at-home studio. Each sketch and model requires hours of measuring out the dimensions for each final object. Photo by Christine Rushton
Binaifer Dabu plays Lady Bracknell in the “Importance of Being Earnest” at the Redhouse in 2015.
Photo courtesy of Bimaifer Dabu.
Binaifer Dabu on stage. Photo courtesy of Binaifer Dabu.
In the 2013 Redhouse production of “Noises Off,” Navroz Dabu steps from behind the scenes as a set designer into an acting role. Photo courtesy of Navroz Dabu.
Navroz and Binaifer Dabu visit with their son Behzad in January. They have two sons, both who share the arts with their parents as singers.
Hints of spice waft in swirls of steam. Pastel teacups brimming with brewed Indian chai rest on the sanded wood of a low table.
Binaifer Dabu and her husband Navroz Dabu sit side-by-side on their leather couch, the twilight sun still warming their faces.
Leaning toward Navroz, Binaifer offers him a cup of the family recipe she dares not alter.
Glass plaques rest on illuminated shelves across from the couple. The Syracuse Area Live Theater (SALT) awards for acting and set design reflect their dedication to the local arts.
Taking part in productions from “Hamlet” to “Noises Off” and “Othello” to “Cabaret,” the Dabus have donated their time to the Syracuse theater community for more than 20 years. Both act and Navroz also designs sets.
One of Navroz’s SALT awards was given for Non-Performing Person of the Year. Another of Binaifer’s was given as Best Supporting Actress in a Musical for her role as R2-D2 in “Star Wars: The Musical.”
Combined they have 18 performing arts awards, including others from the Theatre Association of New York State (TANYS).
“I don’t know what we would do if we did not have the theater in our lives,” Binaifer said.
Navroz sketches detailed designs of each set he creates. He uses the skills he developed while studying architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to model his vision for each production. Last year, he committed his spare time to constructing about seven theater sets.
“At times, I have to put my own money into the set because they don’t have the budget for it,” Navroz said.
His designs come to life in the studio he keeps in his and Binaifer’s downtown apartment. Standing in the center of the room, Navroz picks up a 3-D foamboard model of his latest set, “Hamlet.” The 12-by-4 inch design shows a miniature of the life-size version: a painted red door, latticed windows and stacked stairs.
Navroz started using his architectural skills in theater for fun in 2007.
His son Behzad’s middle school production of “Fiddler on the Roof” needed help. The school, Chestnut Hill Middle School, had a small budget, and Navroz knew how to build using inexpensive cardboard as opposed to the traditional plywood.
He turned a simple set into a recreation of the entire town in “Fiddler on the Roof.”
“Usually middle school sets have mostly painted backdrops,” he said. “But, we created a whole Russian village with the outside and inside of homes; a railway station; and even a large chimney for the fiddler.”
In 2008, he debuted his community theater design in an Appleseed Productions play, “The Dragon.” His design won the TANYS award for Best Scenic Design that year.
Navroz has used his architectural education building sets for several local theater companies including Le Moyne College’s Gifford Family Theater, the Auburn Public Theater,Appleseed Productions, CNY Playhouse, and Syracuse Shakespeare Festival.
Navroz also has worked for Schopfer Architects for more than 25 years. He contributes to building design projects in and around the Syracuse area.
While theater gives him an opportunity to use his talents in the performing arts, he said this season he will take on less projects than in the past. High demand for his designs have strained his time, and he wants to alleviate stress on his creativity.
“Never take anything from the theater. It’s always about giving to the theater.”
“My main motivation was threefold,” Navroz said, “to give my creative juices a chance to be expressed, to be a part of the activity and passion of both my sons and my wife Binaifer – which was theater, and this gave me a chance to volunteer my skills and creative artistic passion for the community.”
Binaifer also works outside of theater for Welch Allyn Medical.
She feels most at home on a stage, though.
Binaifer remembers her house as a child in Surat, India, as in a state of constant chaos. Her parents invited dancers, singers and actors over to practice for local productions. Her father Yazdi, now 78, founded the Parsi group Karanjia Drama Group, which still travels and performs.
“I would come home from school and all I would see in my living room was people rehearsing,” Binaifer said. “My mom would make chai and everyone would rehearse. They were acting like crazy people around the house.”
Like Binaifer and Navroz, Yazdi performs for free. His group only requests accommodations for room and board when they travel.
“Never take anything from the theater,” Navroz said. “It’s always about giving to the theater.”
Binaifer and Navroz grew up in a Parsi community of India. Parsis are direct descendents of the Persian people and migrated to India thousands of years ago. Binaifer describes her Parsi people as lovers of the arts and performers on the stage.
“(Parsis) are eccentric. They’re like ‘My Big Fat Greek Wedding,'” Binaifer said, referring to the movie about a traditional zealous Greek family. “They were also the inventors, the researchers, the philanthropists, writers, creators; in our culture.”
In 1981, Navroz left his city in the state of Gujarat, India, to study architecture at MIT in Boston. Binaifer joined him in 1982 after their families agreed on an arranged marriage. Navroz had fallen in love with Binaifer years before during their childhood. Binaifer, though, hadn’t considered the chance of moving around the world, isolated from family.
She spent her spare time in Boston finding acting jobs and learning the art of auditioning. Performing reminded her of her father. And, it took her mind off the trouble of immigrating to a new country.
Navroz didn’t fully consider the cost of living in America because he knew he wanted the education. So, the couple worked to survive on a limited income.
“I came in a naïve way, I just came,” he said. “I genuinely didn’t think of the money.”
Battling unemployment, lack of income and expiring immigration papers, the Dabus settled in Syracuse around 1989.
Two sons later, the couple felt at home in the city. And, they’ve stayed committed to their Parsi heritage through the arts.
“I think in a way we are honoring the memory of our parents,” Binaifer said.
She has continued acting in the Syracuse theaters, and will play the role of Mrs. Sowerberry in the Redhouse Arts Center production of “Oliver Twist” later this year.
“As my father stated,” Binaifer said, “I want to leave my last breath either on the stage of acting or in the classroom of teaching.”
It is not every day that you see someone wanting to serve their family recipes in a restaurant setting. It is even rare if this restaurant is not a quick service restaurant (QSR) but a humble five-table dining space, running from an unlikely location for a restaurant and prides itself as a regional cuisine-specific delivery model.
The road gets its name from a Parsi family that had such strong business links with Aden, they decided to make it part of their identity. But trade wasn’t the only bridge between India and Yemen. Islam has long bound the two countries, with clerics and lay people travelling back and forth from the medieval age.
The strategic location of Yemen, close to the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, means that it has always been an important centre of Islamic theology. As a result, the medieval age saw Islamic saints come down from Yemen to India, especially the Deccan. The most significant transfer of this sort might have been the migration of the spiritual leader of the Dawoodi Bohra community to Gujarat in the 16th century.
Yemenis in India
Yemen also exported fighters. Mercenaries from Yemen were well known for their skills of war and were in great demand, especially in the Deccan. Bahadur Shah, the Sultan of Gujarat in the 16th century had 10,000 Yemenis in his army and and Nana Phadnavis’ Maratha empire employed 5,000 fighters who were the highest paid soldiers in the entire army. Later on, with the fall of the Marathas, these Yemenis would serve the Hyderabad Nizams, where they were just as well regarded: they often served as guards of the Nizam’s palace.
The descendants of those soldiers still live in India. On the Konkan coast, there are Marathi-speaking Muslims of Yemeni descent. They are called Jamaatis and their Marathi is heavily influenced by Arabic loanwords, reflecting their origins. In Hyderabad, they are called the Chaush and many of still live in the Barkas neighbourhood.
The traffic between India and Yemen intensified greatly after 1839, when the British conquered Aden and declared it a free port. The city came to be used as a coal refuelling station for steamships sailing between India and Europe. The building of the Suez Canal in 1869 transformed the city into a entrepot for trade between Europe, Asia and Africa.
Cowasji Dinshaw (the name “Adenwala” would be added later), a Parsi merchant of Mumbai, saw this potential early on and arrived in Aden in 1845. He proceeded to remodel the port to make it capable of handling the steamer traffic between the Indian Ocean and Europe, turning Aden the Singapore of its age. At the turn of the century, his son, Hormusjee, expanded the business, eventually acting as bankers, naval agents, shipowners, managing agents for mills and steamship companies. When the Suez Canal, the world’s largest shipping company at the time, the British India Steam Navigation Company, hired the Adenwalahs as their agents in Aden.
Bust of Hormusji Dinshaw Adenwala at Tardeo Road. Photo: Bombaywalla
Uncrowned kings of Aden
Vispi Dastur, postal historian and president of the Bombay Parsi Association, says that the family were at the time knows as the “uncrowned kings of Aden”. In 1911, King George V was hosted by the Adenwalas in Aden as he travelled to India for the Delhi Durbar in order to celebrate his coronation. The chairs that were used in that function, says Dastur, are still used by the family’s descendants in their Adenwala Baug mansion in Tardeo Road.
Aden wasn’t done with giving India tycoons. In 1950, a 16-year-old boy named Dhirubhai Ambani made his journey to Aden, a city still ruled by the British, to work as a clerk for Besse & Co. Later on, Besse & Co. would become distributers for Shell and their petroleum products and it was here that Ambani first came up with the (at the time crazy) idea of building a oil refinery back home in India.
While most Indians are unaware of these centuries of interaction with Yemen, a rather delectable result of this connection is much more familiar: haleem.
Hareesah to haleem
The 10th-century Arab scribe Abu Muhammad al-Muzaffar ibn Sayyar wrote down a recipe in the Kitab al-Tabikh (The Book of Recipes) for a meat porridge that he called hareesah. The Kitab was a collection of recipes from the kitchens of the “kings and caliphs and lords and leaders” of Baghdad. It mentions a number of meat and wheat porridges and says that “if the wheat was beaten to a smooth paste” it was to be called hareesah.
Hareesah has survived well into the modern age, and is still popular in the Middle East as an staple during Ramzan. The Yemen mercenaries who came to the Deccan in the medieval age bought it with them. Sometime in the 1930s, Sultan Saif Nawaz Jung, a Hyderabadi Yemeni-origin noble in the Nizam’s court, popularised hareesah by having it served at his feasts.
Hareesah being served in Barkas, Hyderabad. Photo: Shoaib Daniyal
This hareesah was slowly Indianised in Hyderabad. The original dish contained only meat, wheat, cinnamon and ghee, cooked on a slow fire till everything turned to a mash. The Hyderabadis added a variety of dals. And, of course, masalas, India’s secret weapon, found their way into the dish.
This modified dish took the name “haleem” and was by the 1950s being sold in Hyderabad’s restaurants, especially during the Islamic fasting month of Ramzan. Soon, it spread to other parts of the country and became a Ramzan staple.
Entry form for the FOZAWAC All Parsi Badminton Tournament to be held on 2nd and 3rd May 2015
ADMISSION: 50/- PER EVENT.
LAST DATE FOR ENTRIES MONDAY 27TH APRIL 2015..
Tournament will be subject to entries. (IF ADEQUATE ENTRIES are RECEIVED IN ANY OF THE OPEN SINGLE EVENTS FROM GIRLS / LADIES SEPARATE TOURNAMENT WOULD BE HELD FOR THEM)
ALL PARTICIPANTS MUST REPORT FOR THEIR MATCH 15 MINUTES PRIOR TO THE REPORTING TIME.
IF A PLAYER DOES NOT REPORT WITHIN 15 MINUTES OF THE REPORTING TIME A WALK OVER WILL BE GRANTED. Decision of the Management will be final.
THE FIXTURES ARE SUBJECT TO CHANGES / ALTERATIONS / CANCELLATION.
IF A MINIMUM OF SIX ENTRIES ARE NOT RECEIVED IN ANY EVENT IT MIGHT BE CLUBBED WITH ANOTHER EVENT, OR CANCELLED.
The steady inspiring rise of Zia Mody
Last updated on: April 06, 2015 18:34 IST
We bring you this excerpt from Shaili Chopra’s book, When I was 25.
You’ve seen them at the peak of their careers — P Chidambaram, Dimple Kapadia,Rajdeep Sardesai, Shashi Tharoor and many more.
But what were they like when they were 25? What was India like when they were that young? And what can young India learn from their lives?
Shaili Chopra‘s book, When I was 25, traces the youth of these (among many other) successful personalities as they open up about the challenges they faced and the choices they made to reach where they are today.
In the following extract, Chopra narrates the steady and inspiring rise of Zia Mody:
Dealmaker or dealbreaker, Zia Mody is a quintessential workaholic, and thrives on long, busy days.
She is among India’s most prolific lawyers and a mascot for career women who pursue their passions despite familial responsibilities.
She believes nothing should come in the way of your ability to work and you should give it your best shot.
She is driven, honest, never ducks from hard work, and has to her credit some of the country’s top deals.
And this success has almost nothing to do with the house she was born in.
Former Attorney General Soli Sorabjee’s daughter may have chosen law inspired by her dad’s experience but Zia Mody is a woman after her own dreams and passions.
Since most of his friends, says Dr Kotwal, cannot read Urdu, he collaborated with ghazal-bhajan singer Anoop Jalota and cut an album titled Aashiqana. Tired of hearing the factually incorrect but a popular line nevertheless “Urdu musalman ki zuban hai(Urdu is the language of the Muslims)“, Kotwal responds with a couplet: “Urdu na musalman na Hindu ki hai zubanIshq, wafa ke rang ki khushboo ki hai zubaan (Urdu is a language neither of Muslims nor Hindus It is a language of love, loyalty and fragrance). Such maudlin praise for Urdu which is not his mother tongue comes out of a conviction that language doesn’t have a religion. “It is the communal politics which divides a language along religious line. The vote bank politics has only compounded the crisis,“ he explains.
Growing up in Mumbai (then Bombay) when it was home to poetic giants like Ali Sardar Jafri, Majrooh Sultanpuri, Sahir Ludhianvi and Kaifi Azmi, Dr Kotwal says he fell in love with Urdu when in college. Since his father Shavak Kotwal was a film distributor, he would often meet poets and lyricists. The temptation to learn the language took him to a bookshop on Mohammed Ali Road where he bought a primer and subsequently hired a maulvi. But maulvisaab could only teach him the language, not the finer points of poetry. For that he approached Shafique Abbas, a former Urdu teacher and poet at Anjuman-IIslam near CST.
The technique of creating correct couplets fine-tuned, Dr Kotwal started reading voraciously and now writes prolifically. He plans to bring out a collection of his ghazals soon. “Then I will be called a Parsi with a book in Urdu,“ he laughs.