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What do you do in a foreign country where your community barely totals 60 families, and you want to cling on desperately to your religious and cultural traditions? What can you do to ensure your barely visible community doesn't suffer haemorrhage and dies? Indeed, in what way can a Parsi in Paris hope to survive the sweeping global culture and the influence of the West and stave off extinction? Not much, you'd say, just pray and hope for the best.But these aren't the only things Kersi Kapadia is doing to preserve the tradition of Parsis in France. Says he: "It's an uphill battle that we face. We are so few left and so dispersed. But perhaps that is precisely the reason why we are fighting hard to preserve our roots."Kersi migrated to France four years ago, preferring the romantic city of Paris to the US where he had superannuated as an engineer. He and his family have dedicated themselves to preserving Parsi heritage and explaining the religion to the new generation brought up in a land culturally rather distant from theirs. But Kersi faces several impediments in...