On 2 October 2024, inside the World's Largest Peace Dome at MIT World Peace University in Pune, a life size bronze figure of Zarathustra was unveiled before a crowd that had processed in behind a ceremonial band, Parsi community members dressed in traditional garas and duglis. Four priests from two separate Mumbai fire temples performed ceremonial prayers over the new statue, treating its installation as an occasion warranting genuine religious rite rather than a purely civic ribbon cutting.
The event was a joint undertaking between the university, led by its founder Prof. Dr. Vishwanath Karad, and the Zoroastrian College, led by its own founder Dr. Meher Master-Moos, an institutional pairing that put a specifically Zoroastrian religious body at the center of a university sponsored monument. The program built around the unveiling, a film on Zarathustra's life, a peace bell rung, a sacred lamp lit, was deliberately framed by the organizers as an expression of interfaith harmony, timed to coincide with the 155th birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi. A companion statue of the Chinese Buddhist monk Xuanzang was unveiled the same afternoon, standing alongside Zarathustra as another figure honored in the same complex.
What makes the occasion more than a piece of civic sculpture is the priesthood's own involvement. A statue blessed by working fire temple clergy, processed to by community members in traditional dress, carries a different weight than a monument installed and left to stand on its own; the Parsi community treated its arrival as a religious event, not merely an artistic one.