Hail Lord Professor Don Ron ! Setting me an exam paper, eh? There isn't enough space in this box to hold my response, but I'll try (hoping for an A1, if you don't mind). Your friend Behram is a Parsee, Zoroastrians from Persia who fled the Islamisation of Persia. They became an extremely influential and well-knit community (given to commerce and culture) in India: witness the TATA industrialists, etc. The very fact that Behram named his sons after illustrious pre-anno domini Persian kings who waged wars (or stemmed Greek or Macedonian/Alexander's incursions into Asia Minor) shows to what extent he believed in the Ahura-Mazda/Ahriman (Yin-Yang) fire-worship of his ancestors. The ancient Greeks (like all Euro-American Christian peoples) were obsessed with wars against one another (the Athenian versus Sparta Peloponnesian War that lasted some forty years which produced the first scientifically documented War history by the General Thucydides) and so on and on until Napoleon and Hitler (and Putin ?). Of course, Asians are no exception. Check Nietsche's Also Sprach Zarathustra for a "reason", if you will. And don't forget to what extent the West, the Mongols and the Japanese humiliated and robbed the Chinese who now have filled the rice bowl for each and everyone who are willing to forego "freedom and democracy" for a while yet.

I once attended a play that clearly showed that God was always on the side of the winner of a war. And I'm not sure how you included Zoroastrians in this poem. Shouting peace or hypocritically calling for peace while going to war.

I met an engineering student from Bombay while studying for my master's degree at the University of Wisconsin. We got along great and ended up rooming together that summer during summer school in an apartment. Behram, along the way, told me that he was from Persia and a Zoroastrian who didn't practice the religion. His wife was a Christian and still in India.

When he got his master's degree in manufacturing engineering and a good job in New York State, he sent for his wife. They had three sons: Cyrus, Darius and Xerxes. I checked on him last week. His wife, Gool, passed away a couple of years ago from multiple diseases, but not Covid, and he is living alone and quite well at 84. One practice of the Zoroastrians that I like was having their bodies at death taken to rooftops where the vultures could take them back into the lifecycle of the ecosystem. Probably better than burying dead people in boxes in the ground.

Ron