Why cannot 'Pateti' be 'Happy', for crying out loud?!!
This 'Pateti' (the last day of the Parsi calendric year), like every year, I sent out messages to my friends, family and relatives, wishing them a ‘Happy Pateti’ and ‘Pateti mubarak’. But this year, the greetings have garnered some backlashes. A couple of my Parsi friends responded to my well-meaning ‘Pateti’ greetings with pedantic messages aiming at informing me about the inappropriateness of my greetings. According to them the impropriety of my greetings stems from the fact that ‘Pateti’ is not a day of celebration, but a day of repentance. It is to cleanse yourself of your sins, ask your maker for redemption and resolve to be a better person in the coming year. This act of redeeming oneself of past sins is performing the ‘Patet’ as it were... a fact not unknown to most Parsis (including me). However to one of these friends it seemed highly inappropriate that I should affix such a day of ‘Patet’ (Repentance) with words such as ‘Happy’ or ‘Mubarak’, and she let me kno