NEW DELHI
\nOne of India\u2019s oldest and most prominent Parsi magazines, Parsiana, will publish its final issue this week, closing after a six-decade run of chronicling the country\u2019s declining Zoroastrian minority population.
\nFounded in 1964 by Pestonji Warden, a Parsi doctor and entrepreneur, Parsiana was for the first nine years focused largely on religious, historic, and academic subjects.
\nThe focus changed to current affairs in 1973, when it was bought by Jehangir Patel, who, a few years earlier, returned to India after graduating from Yale University.
\nHaving worked for the San Francisco Examiner and the Hartford Times in the US, and upon return, the Mumbai-based Freedom First magazine, Patel took on board professional journalists to cover contemporary issues concerning the Parsis both in India and abroad.
\nBut over 60 years after its founding, the magazine\u2019s readership has been shrinking along with the community, which has declined sharply over the past decades, leaving the editorial board without successors to continue running it.
\nParsiana\u2019s current team has 15 members. Most of them have been working at the publication for 40 years and are in their 60s.
\n\u201cOne lady is almost 80, and I\u2019m also 80, so it didn\u2019t seem possible for us to continue,\u201d Patel said.
\n\u201cTo find new people to come and work with us, or even non-Parsis, is very difficult, and generally in journalism, people are looking to other professions.\u201d
\nThe Parsis are a small community of Zoroastrians in the Indian subcontinent, who originally came from Persia. Some of its prominent representatives include the Tata family \u2014 India\u2019s key industrialist \u2014 as well as the conductor Zubin Mehta and Freddie Mercury, the late lead singer of Queen.
\nMost of the community\u2019s members live in Mumbai, but there is also a diaspora in India\u2019s south, in Bengaluru, and in Karachi, Pakistan. A few thousand Parsis also live in the US, UK and Canada.
\nOver the last century, the number of Parsis has fallen by half due to late marriages and low birth rates.
\n\u201cWe\u2019re dwindling. According to the 2011 census, 57,000 Parsis were in India. Now, the figure must be less than 40,000,\u201d Patel said.
\n\u201cIt\u2019s very hard to increase the population. No government in the world has succeeded in reversing a declining population trend. People don\u2019t want to get married. If people get married late, and maybe have one child or don\u2019t have children, our replacement ratio is probably less than 1 percent \u2026 It\u2019s an aging community.\u201d
\nParsiana\u2019s final issue will be published on Oct. 21, with a story featuring clocks in Zoroastrian fire temples. Some of those tower timepieces at the 50 remaining temples in Mumbai do not even function anymore.
\n\u201cWe\u2019ve written about clocks in the fire temples, how they are maintained, how they are looked after \u2026 To find parts for them is not easy. So, a lot of these clocks are just not working,\u201d Patel said.
\n\u201cA lot of these clocks are just not working, or are just lying over there, only to get one person who maybe comes to wind them up. But even that person is too old now to come around \u2026 At our fire temples, there are hardly any visitors, hardly any devotees.\u201d
\nWhen Parsiana announced its closure in one of its editorials in August, a reader commented that its closure would leave a void.
\n\u201cYour professionalism, courage, and passion have not only elevated the standards of community journalism but have also given a voice to countless Zoroastrian stories,\u201d they wrote in a letter to the editor. \u201cParsiana has been our pride and our companion \u2014 its absence will be deeply felt.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
NEW DELHI One of India\u2019s oldest and most prominent Parsi magazines, Parsiana, will publish its final issue this week, closing after a six-decade run of chronicling the country\u2019s declining Zoroastrian minority population. Founded in 1964 by Pestonji Warden, a Parsi doctor and entrepreneur, Parsiana was for the first nine years focused largely on religious, historic, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":509627,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-509609","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world"},"yoast_head":"\n