Whitepaper On

Aging Across The Zarathushti World

Authors: Nawaz Merchant and Dolly Dastoor

Introduction:

This white paper documents the learnings from our session: “Aging Across the Zarathushti World” at the 2022 World Zoroastrian Congress held in New York. For this session, the authors solicited Zoroastrian (Zarathushti) Associations in different countries about the condition of Z seniors and learnt about their needs as well as models that help improve Z senior’s quality of life. We found that many Z diasporas are well supported. Many of the survey respondents described aging Z immigrants cared for by their children and with some governmental social support or community services from Zarathushti and secular groups. However, our analysis surfaced a growing need among Z seniors in India.

As with most communities, Zarathushtis want to support their own family members. But what about those who we are not directly related to. Do we have an obligation to them? Do we agree that our global Zarathushti community is one? The authors believe we should support our aging co-religionists and offer suggestions based on the research for this session and subsequent visits to India.