Word: parsi
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...last adherents of a great religion that once enlisted millions of ad herents throughout central Asia,&* the Parsis have traditionally influenced In dia well out of proportion to their numbers. Prosperous, cosmopolitan, literate, they dominate today the business community of Bombay. Industrialist J.R.D. Tata, whose steel mills constitute India's largest privately owned enterprise, is a Parsi; so are General Sam Hormuzji Framji Jamshedji Manekshaw, one of India's top military leaders, and Zubin Mehta, conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra. Parsi girls for the last three years have won the title of Miss India...
...independence. Poor health and the onset of World War II forced Indira to break off her studies and return home in 1941. She plunged at once into her country's increasingly bloody battle for independence. Showing some independence of her own, she defied her father and married an obscure Parsi lawyer named Feroze Gandhi (no kin to the Mahatma). Within a few months Feroze and his bride were both in British prisons on charges of subversion. Much like her dolls, Indira had been arrested while leading a parade of women demonstrators down the main streets of Allahabad...
...child, she watched her parents hauled off repeatedly to jail by India's British rulers, whiled away her loneliness by teaching her dolls to emulate Gandhi's principles of civil disobedience. "All my games were political," she recalls. Defying her father, she married an obscure Parsi lawyer named Feroze Gandhi (no kin to the Mahatma), later was jailed with him for 13 months on charges of subversion. After bearing two sons, she left her husband in 1947 and returned to her father's rambling mansion in New Delhi...
...Bombay are linked in their visual splendor and their vicious slums; wealth and poverty exist cool cheek by grizzled jowl. Madras, with its burgeoning Hindu evangelism (backed by Shastri's strongman, Congress Party President Kumaraswami Kamaraj), is less metropolitan but more leisurely. Where Bombay is sparked by its Parsi businessmen (descended from 8th century Persian fire worshipers), Madras is tempered by Tamil intellectualism. New Delhi-founded in 1911 by the British -is the youngest of the nation's great cities, and its least distinctive. Dust swirls through its broad, beige streets; beggars sleep on its sidewalks beneath gaudy...
Oxford-educated Indira (she studied history) was a disciple of Gandhi, worked as a girl among untouchables in city slums, joined the embattled Congress Party. In 1942, she defied her Brahman father by marrying an obscure Parsi lawyer named Feroze Gandhi (no kin to the Mahatma), with him was jailed by the British for 13 months on charges of subversion. She spent her prison term teaching illiterate convicts. After five years and two sons, she left Feroze to return to Nehru's rambling mansion in New Delhi; her husband died...