In your editorial about the closure of Parsiana ("Mirror, mirror on the wall…” September 21-October 6, 2025) you mention the numerous offers you have received from across India and overseas to sustain the publication, while in the same breath you explain your insistence on shutting it down due to a "difficulty in attracting new editorial entrants.”
You also ask whether any "newcomer” would have "in-depth knowledge of the community.” If such thinking had occurred to the magazine’s founder Dr Pestonji Warden who launched it in 1964 he would not have sold it to the present owners nine years later in 1973 and Parsiana would have died a silent death way back then.
In your curious keenness to perform the last rites of a fine publication you have nurtured over 52 years you are not only disparaging the wealth of writing talent of both youngsters and the elderly within the community but of everyone else for not coming up to your expectations of "in-depth knowledge of the community.”
If someone is concerned enough to keep Parsiana alive, what is the problem in giving them the chance to do so? If they fail, then someone else can move in. There needs to be only a handful of in-house writers who would anchor the content, the rest being the purview of stringers. This is how many publications are run today, and run successfully.
It is in everyone’s interest that you review your decision that history will well record as a monumental error of judgment. SAROSH BANA
sarosh.bana@gmail.com
The editors reply:
You may be right.