Parsi Khabar

Fleeing from tormentors in the Middle-East, this community first found refuge in Gujarat. They speak the Gujarati language and every chronicle of Mumbai’s history has them at the centrestage.
By Ashish Vashi & Harit Mehta, TNN
An important Gujarati export to Mumbai, Parsis fought wars, contributed to business development and built dockyards. This community, which first [...]

With a new editor taking over Jam-e-Jamshed, the recently acquired reformist views of the 177-year-old Parsi weekly may be toned down
By Manoj R Nair / Mumbai Mirror
On Sunday, readers of Jam-e-Jamshed, a Parsi community weekly and one of the oldest newspapers in the country, were surprised at the sudden change in its editorial line.
For the [...]

Do not be alarmed if you see a group of masked youngsters armed with brooms and mops entering a fire temple on a Sunday morning.
KEEPING HERITAGE SPIC AND SPAN
By Mahafreed Irani / TNN

Mumbai: They belong to a voluntary gang of bravehearts on their way to scrub the agiary inners. College students Ronisha Chinoy, Sharmin [...]

Farhad Bhesania, 31, a Godrej Baug resident, has never regretted the decision he took nearly 17 years ago. Belonging to a family of Parsi priests, Bhesania chose a different path for himself.
By Ashutosh Shukla / DNA
“If I had stepped into my family’s footsteps, I would have lived in guilt,” said Bhesania who works as [...]

More than 2,000 Parsis flocked to celebrate the anniversary of the city’s youngest fire temple last week.
The Shapurji Fakirji Jokhi Agiary in Godrej Baug, Malabar Hill, completed 10 years on December 18. The priest performed prayer ceremonies in the afternoon. Youth leaders also spoke to the people about uniting as a community. The celebrations finished [...]

Residents of the landmark Dadar Parsi Colony, the largest Zoroastrian enclave in the world, have won a six-year-long legal battle to allow only members of this tiny community to live in this ‘reserved area’.
By Nauzer Bharucha | TNN
The city civil court has granted a permanent injunction restraining the builder from selling flats to anyone who [...]

A book review of Alice in Bhuleshwar: Navigating A Mumbai Neighbourhood by Kaiwan Mehta
While wandering through the streets of Mumbai’s old town, Kaiwan Mehta comes across a Venetian-style bust of a 19th century Bombay ‘merchant prince’ atop the Swadeshi Market along Kalbadevi Road.
A few streets way, he discovers [...]

By Nauzer Bharucha, / TNN
In a city where a decent two-BHK apartment within 30 km of the business district is the exclusive domain of crorepatis, the Bombay Parsi Punchayat (BPP) will sell almost 75 flats in Panthaky Baug, Andheri (East), to low-income community members at a rock-bottom rate of Rs 2,400 a square foot. [...]

Team Flashy consisting of Homiar Hathiram, Farhad Choksi and Eric Mehta won the Annual All – Parsi Quiz contest took place on Sunday Novermber 22, 2009 at the Rustom Baug Pavilion. There were twenty teams in all and the quiz was mainly on History, geography, sports, our religion, hollywood n bollywood. The written qualifying rounds [...]

By Rusi Sorabjee
IDEAL RESTAURANT ….a gastronomic heaven (Still there in 2009,But shifted about 100 mtrs away and inside from main road.)
(The IRANI Restaurant… quintessentially Zarathushti Restaurant of old.)
It was an old building standing guard –resolute and proud – on Hornby Road, a street that was and still is the main artery of Bombay. It used [...]

The opening line from an old and much loved nursery rhyme buzzed around my ears, as I walked to the romantically named Paris Bakery recently. The origin of the name of this perennially crowded shop, located halfway down the narrow Our Lady of Dolours Church lane, off Princess Street, is shrouded in rather vague [...]

After 30 years, 100 hawkers evicted from Cross Maidan
It was jubilation on Saturday for local residents, who finally succeeded in ridding the southern tip of Cross Maidan of a major nuisance
By Manoj R Nair
Demolition crews from the City Collectorate removed over 100 stalls that had stubbornly resisted all earlier attempts of eviction
For the first time [...]

It’s funny that the only Irani features in an Irani cafe are black tea and its owner. The menu usually has Parsi food, which has more in common with Lucknow than Tehran. It’s ironic that the city’s fair-sized population of Iranis-both Muslims and Zoroastrians who migrated to India from Iran several centuries after their Parsi [...]

This is a hilarious forward sent to us by dear family friend and regular Parsi Khabar reader Bakhtavar Mistry.
BE PROUD as After the the British colonies there is only the parsi colonies on which the sun never sets Because ……………
at 2 am old ladies are chasing stray dogs with sticks,
at 3 am somebody’s [...]

See corporator’s attempt to include representatives of the community in the upcoming Assembly elections as a gimmick
A proposal from a Malabar Hill corporator to include representatives from the Parsi community in the upcoming state Assembly elections has not found favour with the community.
The letter by BJP Corporator Mangal Prabhat Lodha to Governor S C Jamir, [...]