��������

NEW DELHI: One of India’s oldest and most prominent Parsi magazines, Parsiana, will publish its final issue this week, closing after a six-decade run of chronicling the country’s 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, and academic subjects.

The 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.

Having 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.

But over 60 years after its founding, the magazine’s 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.

Parsiana’s current team has 15 members. Most of them have been working at the publication for 40 years and are in their 60s.

“One lady is almost 80, and I’m also 80, so it didn’t seem possible for us to continue,” Patel said.

“To 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.”

The 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 — India’s key industrialist — as well as the conductor Zubin Mehta and Freddie Mercury, the late lead singer of Queen.

Most of the community’s members live in Mumbai, but there is also a diaspora in India’s south, in Bengaluru, and in Karachi, Pakistan. A few thousand Parsis also live in the US, UK and Canada.

Over the last century, the number of Parsis has fallen by half due to late marriages and low birth rates.

“We’re dwindling. According to the 2011 census, 57,000 Parsis were in India. Now, the figure must be less than 40,000,” Patel said.

“It’s very hard to increase the population. No government in the world has succeeded in reversing a declining population trend. People don’t want to get married. If people get married late, and maybe have one child or don’t have children, our replacement ratio is probably less than 1 percent … It’s an aging community.”

Parsiana’s 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.

“We’ve written about clocks in the fire temples, how they are maintained, how they are looked after … To find parts for them is not easy. So, a lot of these clocks are just not working,” Patel said.

“A 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 … At our fire temples, there are hardly any visitors, hardly any devotees.”

When Parsiana announced its closure in one of its editorials in August, a reader commented that its closure would leave a void.

“Your professionalism, courage, and passion have not only elevated the standards of community journalism but have also given a voice to countless Zoroastrian stories,” they wrote in a letter to the editor. “Parsiana has been our pride and our companion — its absence will be deeply felt.”

PARIS: Robbers wielding power tools scaled a furniture hoist outside the Louvre to make off with priceless jewelry from the world-renowned museum on Sunday, taking just seven minutes for the brazen, broad-daylight heist, sources and officials said.

The theft — just the latest to have targeted a French institution in recent months — saw the museum, the world’s most visited and filled with treasures including the Mona Lisa, shut its doors for the day to the busy weekend crowds.

AFP saw a police forensics team arrive and go into the museum, while uniformed soldiers with automatic rifles patrolled the Louvre’s famed esplanade, which was cleared of all visitors. Roads around the museum were closed off with police tape.

Interior Minister Laurent Nunez said three of four thieves had used the furniture hoist to steal “priceless” goods from the museum’s “Gallerie d’Apollon” (“Apollo’s Gallery“).

It was not immediately clear what exactly they had stolen from the gilded gallery, which the museum’s website says is home to the French crown jewels.

They include three historical diamonds – the Regent, the Sancy and the Hortensia – as well as an emerald and diamond necklace that Napoleon gave his wife Empress Marie-Louise, it said.

The thieves arrived between 9:30 a.m. and 9:40 a.m. (0730 and 0740 GMT) for their robbery, a source following the case said.

A separate police source said the robbers had drawn up on a scooter armed with angle grinders and used the hoist to reach the room they were targeting.

The brazen robbery happened just 800 meters (yards) from Paris police headquarters.

France’s Culture Minister Rachida Dati earlier on Sunday reported a “robbery” at the museum and said “no injuries” had been reported.

The Louvre said on X it was closing its doors for the day “for exceptional reasons.”

But contacted by AFP, it did not wish to immediately provide further comment.

The Paris prosecutor’s office said it had opened an investigation and the value of the loot was still being estimated.

Series of heists

The seat of French kings until Louis XIV abandoned it for Versailles in the late 1600s, the Louvre is regularly listed as the world’s most visited museum.

The exhibition venue welcomed nine million visitors last year.

Louis XIV commissioned the “Gallerie d’Apollon” himself. It later served as a model for the Hall of Mirrors at the Chateau de Versailles.

Several French museum have recently been targeted.

Last month, thieves broke into Paris’s Natural History Museum, making off with gold samples worth €600,000 ($700,000).

They used an angle grinder and a blow torch to steal the native gold, a metal alloy containing gold and silver in their natural unrefined form.

In November last year, four thieves stole snuffboxes and other precious artifacts from another Paris museum in broad daylight, breaking into a display case with axes and baseball bats.

They snuck into the Cognacq-Jay museum wearing gloves, hoods and helmets, striking in full view of other visitors to the museum.

French President Emmanuel Macron in January pledged the Louvre would be “redesigned, restored and enlarged” after its director voiced alarm about dire conditions inside.

He said he hoped that the works could help increase the annual number of visitors to 12 million.