The editor who turned a stodgy journal into a whippersnapper on the end of ‘Parsiana’

Come October, ‘Parsiana’ will ‘go gentle into that good night’. Unheeding of its legion of admirers who now “rage, rage against the dying of the light” aka its imminent closure.

- Bachi Karkaria

For 52 years, this doughty community magazine has served the dwindling Indian Parsi population and its spreading diaspora. Mirror, path-guider, trend-tracker, back-patter, call-outer - and therefore as much hackle-raiser as praise-getter. But as with our qaum, age and ill-health have caught up with its intrepid editor, Jehangir Patel -- and his team too. He rues, “I'm 80. So is one of our senior editors; our managing editor is 65.” Premature deaths also rang the knell. Earlier this year, its multi-talented senior editor Farrokh Jijina succumbed at 65 to an illness unbeknownst even to his friends, let alone those he'd mentored at the informative Khaki Tours. How much could the remaining handful do? Sadly, there are few waiting and willing to be groomed.

Groom Jehangir certainly did. ‘Parsiana’ stood out as much for its taut writing and tight editing. In the '70s, he'd returned my contribution saying, “It lacks structure.” I tease him about it today, but back then I was outraged at being rejected by this little startup when I was already writing cover stories for the nationally acclaimed ‘Illustrated Weekly’ of Khushwant Singh! But there's a parallel. Just as that legendary editor had unrecognizably transformed A S Raman’s dull, godmen-adulating ‘Weekly’, Jehangir Patel had shaken up the Hatches-Matches-Despatches Parsi genre, and turned Dr Pestonji Warden's plodding journal into a whippersnapper.