Religion: The Towers of Silence

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India's Parsi community has been further diminished by emigration to other countries, but that could possibly be the religion's salvation. In New York last week, when Parsis from the Eastern seaboard gathered to mark the spring equinox with a New Year's festival, many of the couples present were mixed marriages in which the Parsi father raises his children in the old religion. The Parsis of the New World (as well as a few in India) have also hit on a resolution of the burial problem—apparently without breaking the tenets of their faith—by cremating bodies. As they see it, the use of electric cremation ovens instead of flame does not violate the purity of the sacred element of fire.