Tom Alter: Actor, Cricketer, Urdu lover and Caucasian Unlikely combination of professions and hobbies for a man named Thomas Beach Alter, who hailed from a family of American missionaries. His acting abilities were never in doubt, and the barest accent betrayed his ethnicity. But his skin and hair distinguished him from other Indian co-actors quite noticeably, and he had to be content with parts showing him as a British colonial or modern day baddie. There were occasions when he was made to s...

The Path of Zarathustra, Review: The temperature of departure To say that Parsees are a minority community in India, or, for that matter, anywhere in the world, might be an understatement. Official figures put their entire population as 80,000, most of them being Indians. Followers of the prophet Zarathustra (Zoraster) and natives of Iran, they fled an oppressive regime in their parent country to seek refuge in India, and were granted asylum in what is present day Gujarat, along the western c...