Vultures and Religion

When vultures become extinct, why should a religion face a threat?

“When the vultures died off, they stopped eating the bodies of Zoroastrians…” I was amused as I went on reading the book The Final Farewell by Minakshi Dewan. The book is about how the dead are dealt with by people of different religious persuasions. Dead people are quite useless, unless you love euphemism. Or, as they say, dead people tell no tales. In the end, we are all just stories made by people like the religious woman who wrote the epitaph for her atheist husband: “Here lies an atheist, all dressed up and no place to go.”

Zoroastrianism is a religion which converts death into a sordid tale by throwing the corpses of its believers to vultures. Death makes one impure, according to that religion. Well, I always thought, and still do, that life makes one impure. I have the support of Lord Buddha on that. Life is dukkha, said the Enlightened. That is, suffering, dissatisfaction and unease. Death is liberation from dukkha. But prophet Zoroaster would debate that. I do hope that Buddha and Zoroaster are having healthy debates in whichever galaxy they may be existing now. Thinking in that vein, I wonder whether prophet Muhamad and Lord Rama are fighting up there on the issue of the demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya and the subsequent construction of the splendid Ram Mandir by the present Emperor of India.

That brings me back to Minakshi Dewan’s book. The Zoroastrians were driven away from Iran by the Arabs who conquered the land and converted its people from Zoroaster’s ways to Muhamad’s. I wonder, again, how these prophets greeted each other in that celestial galaxy when this conquest occurred. By the way, Iran was known as Eranshahr in those days, which literally means “Domain of the Aryans.” Now, what do the present Aryan rulers of India have to say about all that, I wonder again. In short, this book about death is very amusing. Thought-provoking, more aptly.

Some of those Zoroastrians who didn’t want to shift their loyalty from one prophet to another ran away and reached India. They came to be known as Parsis (Persians).  These people, Parsis, thought of the dead body as a source of impurity. That is why they threw it to the vultures.

And the vultures have now become extinct creating a huge problem for the Parsis in India. This is probably the only instance of a religion facing the threat of extinction because of the extinction of vultures.

According to a 2016 survey conducted by the Bombay Natural History Society, says Minakshi Dewan, India’s vulture population has decreased by 99% over the last 15 years because of the use of a chemical called diclofenac by the humans. Diclofenac is an anti-inflammatory drug used by humans who also feed it to their livestock as and when required. Vultures that fed on the carcasses of creatures that used diclofenac died off. Vultures are more sensitive, apparently, than humans.

So the bodies of dead Parsis started rotting in their funerary Towers of Silence. Consequently, some practical-minded Parsis have opted for more civilised ways of disposing of their dead members, like using electric crematoriums. The extinction of vultures may have some merits too, it seems. I don’t know if any Parsi is praying to Zoroaster to send some diclofenac-resistant vultures from the galaxy where the prophet is sipping tea in the company of his counterpart Muhamad [PBUH].

I find Minakshi Dewan’s book quite amusing because it tickles my funny bone. By the way, I didn’t buy a copy of this book. It came free like many other books do occasionally in my life now.