Source: The Times of India
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Bringing_up_the_mediums/rssarticleshow/2007701.cms
Parents make the heartbreaking decision to send their children to residential schools for various material reasons. It's seldom for a cause. But last year, parents of 30 Parsi children decided that the cause of serving the community was worthy enough. So they packed them off, some of them only about six years old, to the Athornan Madressa at Dadar, a boarding school for future Zoroastrian priests situated in a leafy by-lane of the Parsi Colony.
The school is one of only two in the world (the other one too, is in Mumbai, in Andheri). Graduates, known as "mobeds"Â or priests who pass out of the school, serve the Zoroastrian community in India and outside. Often, many of them come from humble backgrounds.
In a way, the Madressa signifies the attempts of the besieged Parsi community to keep its traditions alive in the changing world and produce priests who would take care of the shrinking community’s religious traditions and practices. Mobeds usually come from a line of priestly Zoroastrian families, called Athornan. Not all of them attend the school and many of them memorise the prayers and rituals at home before being ordained. But in order to carry out more complex rituals and ceremonies, the mobeds need to complete a stint at one of the two boarding schools.
The innocent small mobeds at the Madressa are more like little muppets, dressed in traditional black cap worn by Zoroastrian priests. On a sultry Saturday afternoon, they are here working hard to learn their prayers amidst the din of a marriage hall right across from the school. With lunch hour minutes away, restless kids drone away, some dreamily looking out of the small classroom on the ground floor. The school itself is a non-descript, three-storied structure, with a mess on the ground floor. The mobeds learn throughout the day, starting at 5:30 in the morning and then attend another normal school (which gives them the required education to pass the tenth standard or SSC board) and by ten in the night retire into a huge dormitory. The school principal, 41-year-old Ramiyar Karanjia lives on the floor above along with his wife and two children.