Pakistan's Parsi community dwindles as young migrate
From a gated community for her Zoroastrian faith in Pakistan's megacity Karachi, 22-year-old Elisha Amra has waved goodbye to many friends migrating abroad as the ancient Parsi community dwindles.
Soon the film student hopes to join them -- becoming one more loss to Pakistan's ageing Zoroastrian Parsi people, a community who trace their roots back to Persian refugees from today's Iran more than a millennium ago.
"My plan is to go abroad," Amra said, saying she wants to study for a master's degree in a country without the restrictions of a conservative Muslim-majority society.
"I want to be able to freely express myself", she added.
Zoroastrianism, founded by the prophet Zarathustra, was the predominant religion of the ancient Persian empire, until the rise of Islam with the Arab conquests of the seventh century.
Once the Parsi community in Pakistan had as many as 15,000-20,000 people, said Dinshaw Behram Avari, the head of one of the most prominent Parsi families.
Today, numbers hover around 900 people in Karachi and a few dozen more elsewhere in Pakistan, according to community leaders, many staying together in compounds like where Amra lives.
She acknowledges her life is more comfortable than many in Pakistan -- the Parsis are in general an affluent and highly educated community.
But says she wants to escape the daily challenges that beset the city of some 20 million people -- ranging from power cuts, water shortages and patchy internet to violent street crime.
"I'd rather have a life where I feel safe, and I feel happy and satisfied," she said.
Zubin Patel, 27, a Parsi working in e-commerce in Karachi, has seen more than two dozen Parsi friends leave Karachi for abroad in the past three years.
"More than 20-25 of my friends were living in Karachi, they all started migrating", he said.
- Derelict homes -
That is not unique to Parsis -- many young and skilled Pakistanis want to find jobs abroad to escape a country wracked with political uncertainty and security challenges, a struggling economy and woeful infrastructure.
The number of highly skilled Pakistanis who left for jobs abroad more than doubled according to the latest figures from the Pakistan Economic Survey -- from 20,865 in 2022, to 45,687 in 2023.
Parsis are struggling to adjust in a fast-changing world.
The religion, considered among the oldest in the world, forbids conversion and mixed marriages are frowned upon.
"There is a better chance to find a Zoroastrian partner in Canada, Australia, UK and America than in Pakistan," said Avari, who heads of a chain of hotels.
He points out that Parsi population of Toronto is some 10 times greater than Karachi.
Avari, 57, said that a wave of Parsis left Pakistan during the hardline military rule of Zia-ul-Haq in the 1980s, who enforced a programme of Islamisation.
Since then, Islamist violence has targeted religious minorities, and while Parsis say they have not been targeted, they remain wary.
He suggested the community's high levels of education and Western outlook to life meant many eyed a future abroad, while for those who do stay, family size is shrinking.
"Couples are more interested today in looking after their career; they are not interested in family," he said.
"When they do get married, they will have one child -- and one child is not enough to make a positive impact on the population."
Parsi members were among the pioneers of the shipping and hospitality industries in Karachi, and the city's colonial-era historic district is dotted with Parsi buildings including hospitals and schools.
But as the community declines, many buildings have crumbled, with as many as half the homes in elegant tree-lined streets of the century-old Sohrab Katrak Parsi Colony lying abandoned.
- 'Difficult decision' -
For many among the younger generation, the only pull left keeping them in Pakistan is their ageing relatives.
Patel, the e-commerce worker, said he would leave if he could.
"It would be a difficult decision," he said. "But if I have an opportunity which would give my parents ... a healthy lifestyle, then I'd obviously go for it".
Amra, who visits her 76-year-old grandfather almost daily, worries that her parents will be alone when she leaves.
"You have to figure out a way, eventually, to either bring them to you or come back," she said.
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Business Insider
a day ago
- Business Insider
Grand staircases, state-shaped pools, and a bowling alley in the basement: Here's what the governor's mansion looks like in every state
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McGreevey, who resigned in 2004, The New York Times reported. The New Mexico governor's mansion is in Santa Fe. The 8,000-square-foot Territorial Revival-style mansion was built in the mid-1950s. It is the third official residence for New Mexico. Harrison Ford was married on the mansion grounds. Tours are offered from April to November and can be booked through the New Mexico Governor's Mansion Foundation. The New York governor's mansion is in Albany. The mansion was built in 1856 and has been the official residence for 32 governors since 1875. It has 40 rooms, a 20-foot master bathroom, and two swimming pools — one indoor and one outdoor, The New York Times reported. It sits on 6 acres. Notable incidents include when Theodore Roosevelt had to break in through a first-floor window when he locked himself out, and Gov. Andrew Cuomo getting spooked when he thought it was haunted by the spirit of a groundskeeper, who served the house's original owners, The New York Post reported. The North Carolina governor's mansion is in Raleigh. The 35,000-square-foot, Victorian-style mansion has been the official residence since 1891, according to the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources. Inside, it has rooms with 16.5-foot ceilings, an elevator, and a bomb shelter. The mansion sits on almost 5 acres, and is the country's third-biggest governor's mansion, Walter magazine reported. Former President Franklin D. Roosevelt thought it had the most beautiful interior out of all of them, according to Visit Raleigh. The North Dakota governor's mansion is in Bismarck. The 13,700-square-foot mansion was finished in 2018 and cost nearly $5 million to build, the Bismarck Tribune reported. It has six bedrooms, 6.5 bathrooms, marble floors, white-oak walls, and cedar ceilings, the Grand Forks Herald reported. It also has a 22-foot ceiling in its reception area, with a spiral staircase that's meant to resemble the Capitol's Memorial Hall. The Ohio governor's mansion is in Columbus. The 13,000-square-foot mansion was built in the 1920s and has housed governors since 1957, according to Friends of the Ohio Governor's Residence and Heritage Garden. It has 20 rooms and features a 3-acre heritage garden. The Oklahoma governor's mansion is in Oklahoma City. The 14,000-square-foot, Dutch Colonial-style mansion has been the official residence since 1928, ABC affiliate KTUL reported. It has a limestone exterior that matches the State Capitol, and a walnut-paneled library filled with books about the state or written by writers from the state, The Oklahoman reported. It also has an Oklahoma-shaped pool and a tennis court that was originally built as a landing pad for President Lyndon B. Johnson's helicopter. The Oregon governor's mansion is in Salem. The 11,409-square-foot, Tudor-style mansion, called "Mahonia Hall," has been the official residence since 1987. It was built in the 1920s, the Statesman Journal reported. It has eight bedrooms, 6.5 bathrooms, a wine cellar, a sun room, and a ballroom. The Pennsylvania governor's mansion is in Harrisburg. The Georgian-style, 28,000-square-foot mansion was built in 1968 and became the official governor's residence that same year, according to the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania's official website. The home is three stories tall and sits on 3.5 acres of land filled with gardens and bee hives. The home was damaged in April when an arsonist set fire to the property. Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro and his family were inside, but unharmed. Their living quarters have reopened, but other parts of the mansion continue to undergo repairs. Rhode Island doesn't have a governor's mansion. Rhode Island's state legislature used to move locations, making a set governor's mansion impractical, WPRO reported. In addition, Rhode Island's size makes for a short commute, and the state reportedly lacked funds to acquire another property while constructing the State House in the early 1900s. The South Carolina governor's mansion is in Columbia. The two-story, Federal-style mansion was built in 1855, originally as an officer quarters for a military academy, The New York Times reported. It has been the official residence since 1868. Inside, there's a formal drawing room and a state dining room. The mansion sits on 9 acres and is shaded by old magnolias, oaks, and elms, according to the National Register of Historic Places. The mansion has housed more than 30 governors and their families. In 2003, then-Gov. Mark Sanford and his family moved into the house after renovations, but due to accepting the lowest bid from construction companies, poor repairs led to six family members having to move into the one-room pool house, The New York Times reported. For the last 40 years, the mansion has been decorated and opened to the public every Christmas. The South Dakota governor's mansion is in Pierre. The 14,000-square-foot, two-story mansion has been the official governor's residence since 2005, according to the South Dakota Bureau of Administration. The mansion has five bedrooms, a grand dining hall that can hold 80 people, two fireplaces, and a commercial kitchen. Its exterior is a mixture of field stone, copper flashing, brick, and concrete. The Tennessee governor's mansion is in Nashville. The three-story, Georgian-style mansion was built in 1931 and became the official residence in 1949, according to the government of Tennessee's official website. The house has 16 rooms, including a 14,000-square-foot banquet and meeting space beneath its front lawn. Inside, some of the art includes a portrait of Elvis Presley and photos of him when he was dating then-Gov. Buford Ellington's daughter, The Tennessean reported. The entrance has a black-and-white marble floor — the black marble was imported from Belgium, and the white from Georgia. It sits on 10 acres and used to be called "Far Hills" because of its view. Free tours are available from mid-March to mid-November. The Texas governor's mansion is in Austin. The Greek Revival-style mansion has been the state's official residence since 1856, according to the Texas State Preservation Board. The house has a veranda, floor-to-ceiling windows, and six 29-foot columns along the front porch. In 2008, an arsonist threw a Molotov cocktail at the house and caused major damage, The New York Times reported. Then-Gov. Rick Perry and his family (who weren't at the house during the fire) couldn't move back in for four years. Before the fire, it housed Texas politician Sam Houston's four-poster bed, and the writing desk of Stephen F. Austin, who has been dubbed the founder of Texas, according to the Texas governor's office. The Utah governor's mansion is in Salt Lake City. The French Renaissance mansion, called the "Kearns Mansion," was built in 1902 and became the official residence in 1937, according to the state of Utah's official website. It has 28 rooms including six bathrooms, 10 fireplaces, a ballroom, a billiards room, two dining rooms, and three vaults for wine and other valuables, Deseret News reported. The interior is decorated in bronze, iron, Russian mahogany, and oak from France and England. The mansion has a bowling alley in the basement, and used to have a large metal safe to keep candy guarded. In 1993, a fire damaged the building and almost $8 million was spent restoring the residence, according to Salt Lake City's City Hall. Vermont doesn't have a governor's mansion. Gov. Phil Scott lives with his family in Berlin, Vermont. The Virginia governor's mansion is in Richmond. The two-story, Federal-style mansion has been the official Virginia governor's residence since 1813. It is the oldest governor's mansion in the country still in use, according to its official website. It has hosted Queen Elizabeth II, Winston Churchill, and former presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Barack Obama. The Washington governor's mansion is in Olympia. The Georgian-style brick mansion has been the Washington governor's official residence since 1909, according to the Olympia Governor's Mansion Foundation. The house features a ballroom and a state dining room. The West Virginia governor's mansion is in Charleston. The Georgian Colonial-style mansion has been the official residence since 1925, according to the West Virginia Humanities Council. The house has eight bedrooms, four bathrooms, a drawing room, a ballroom, a state dining room, a sitting room, and a library. At its entrance, there are black-and-white marble floors; the black is from Belgium, the white from Tennessee. It also has dual staircases, which were inspired by the White House. The Wisconsin governor's mansion is in Maple Bluff. The Classical Revival-style, three-story mansion was built in 1927 and has been the official governor's residence since 1950, according to the Wisconsin Historical Society. It has seven bedrooms and 13 bathrooms, and its walls are between 12 and 18 inches thick, according to the mansion's official website. The grounds feature 10 gardens and overlook Lake Mendota. The Wyoming governor's mansion is in Cheyenne. The current Wyoming governor's mansion was built in 1976 after the previous mansion was turned into a museum, according to the Wyoming Historical Society. The grounds feature a bronze statue of deer titled "Open Season" by Guadalupe Barajas, according to the nonprofit Arts Cheyenne. Editor's note: This story was originally published in 2019. It was updated in June 2025.
Forbes
a day ago
- Forbes
This Cancer Survivor, Now Biotech CEO, Is In A Race To Help Others Live Longer
Maky Zanganeh was born in Tehran in 1970, nine years before the Islamic Revolution convulsed Iran. She remembers one night in particular, when the military police tear-gassed a house at the end of the cul-de-sac next to where her family lived and sprayed it with machine gun fire. She and her two older sisters were home alone. 'In the morning, we woke up at 7 o'clock and had to go to school as if nothing happened,' she says matter-of-factly. 'That was my life when I was in Iran.' Mauricio Candela for Forbes That preternatural composure and no-nonsense attitude has helped Zanganeh navigate a life filled with more twists and turns than a Persian bazaar. A couple years after that horrific night in Tehran, Zanganeh's parents, both architects, fled Iran for Germany. She got a degree in dentistry, then an MBA, but ended up working for an American medical robotics outfit, where she met Bob Duggan, a prominent Scientologist, serial entrepreneur and eventual billionaire with whom she would have a son and later marry. She earned hundreds of millions as an investor and executive, speaks four languages (Farsi, German, English, French), survived breast cancer and runs, as co-CEO with Duggan, Miami-based Summit Therapeutics, a Nasdaq-listed biotech that has minted her a $1.5 billion fortune of her own. That wealth has landed Zanganeh, now 54, on Forbes' list of America's Richest Self-Made Women (at No. 23) for the first time. She is one of 38 self-made female U.S. billionaires on the list, and one of just five to have made a billion-dollar-plus fortune in health care. When she and Duggan took over Summit in 2020, the company had less than $1 million in revenue, tens of millions in losses and just one promising drug in its pipeline, an antibiotic that was shelved in 2022. In less than five years, Zanganeh and Duggan—who married in December—have become biotech stars. Key to their success: licensing an overlooked cancer drug candidate from a company in China. That drug, ivonescimab, now seems likely to be a blockbuster. In a clinical trial last year, it outperformed Keytruda, the world's best-selling drug, which generated nearly $30 billion in 2024 sales for Merck. Investors have driven up Summit shares 575% over the past 12 months, giving it a recent market capitalization of nearly $21 billion, despite having no revenue. 'I think of her as probably the most underrated executive in all of biotech,' says Ken Clark, a partner at law firm Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, who for more than three decades has worked with hundreds of biotech companies and served on multiple boards—including that of Summit Therapeutics. According to Clark, Zanganeh stands out because of how she and Duggan, neither of whom comes from a traditional biotech background, work together to question established wisdom and get things done quickly in unconventional ways. Ivonescimab is now in multiple Phase III trials for different forms of lung cancer, and Summit plans to submit an application for FDA approval by the end of the year. It can't come too soon. Even after advances in treatment and detection of lung cancer over the past two decades, 125,000 Americans die from the disease each year—more than twice the number of deaths from any other cancer, per the National Cancer Institute. What's novel about Summit's drug is how it goes after the cancer in two ways. It stimulates the immune system to attack the cancer cells while also starving the cancer by cutting off blood supply to the tumors. Based on the clinical trial in China last year, the two-pronged approach works. Those on Summit's drug went a median 11.1 months before the cancer returned, compared to 5.8 months for those taking Keytruda. The results, announced last September, led Summit's stock to more than double in four days. Zanganeh's journey from schoolgirl in Tehran to Miami biotech CEO took an unusual route. In 1984, five years after the Shah of Iran was overthrown, her parents moved with her to Germany. Zanganeh settled down with an uncle in Oldenburg, a small city about 30 miles from Bremen, while her parents continued to shuttle between Europe and Iran. Old-fashioned values prevailed: good manners, good health and lots of studying. 'Education was a top priority,' Zanganeh says. Her older sisters both went to medical school in Strasbourg, France. She chose to study dentistry instead and graduated from Louis Pasteur University (now the University of Strasbourg) in 1995. She soon realized dentistry was not for her. 'It was like being in a box every day, doing the same thing,' she says. In 1997, a friend of her sister's told Zanganeh about her job at a U.S. company called Computer Motion, which manufactured robotic arms used to perform minimally invasive surgery. Zanganeh was fascinated and landed a job in the Strasbourg office. Her father convinced her that if she was going to go into business, she would need an MBA, so studying part-time she earned one from Schiller International University in 1998. At 28, Zanganeh was promoted to oversee Computer Motion's business in Europe and the Middle East, which involved visiting surgeons in Dubai, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, introducing them to what was then a new technology. That's also when Zanganeh began working with Computer Motion's CEO, Bob Duggan, who had invested in the company back in 1989. Duggan, now 81, was the yin to Zanganeh's yang. She had been a diligent student and dedicated employee who earned an advanced degree. He had spent at least five years at UC Santa Barbara and UCLA without earning a degree, was a passionate surfer and had worked for himself, except for a brief three-year stint, since he started mowing lawns as a teenager. He's an idea guy with an analytical mind who thinks and talks fast, while Zanganeh excels at process and execution. 'We're very simpatico,' Duggan says. 'She knows all the details and she's got a photographic memory. I'm a visionary. I can see around corners.' In 2003, after Duggan sold Computer Motion to Intuitive Surgical, they began looking for the next big thing. Zaganeh, who was then working for Duggan's personal investment firm, became intrigued with cancer drug developer Pharmacyclics, a money-losing public company with a potentially promising drug—she says she picked it from a list of 15 companies that came in via fax from an analyst. One of Duggan's sons had died of brain cancer, so the company's purpose resonated. Both Duggan and Zanganeh invested in Pharmacyclics in April 2004; Zanganeh sold her Intuitive Surgical shares and borrowed from the bank to come up with the cash. By 2008 Duggan had increased his stake to the point where he controlled the Sunnyvale, California–based company and installed himself as CEO. Zanganeh also joined, first as vice president of business development and later as chief operating officer. In 2011, armed with a fresh early-stage cancer drug (the first one failed), Duggan began talking up a partnership with Johnson & Johnson, which needed to boost its cancer drug pipeline. Zanganeh made it come to fruition. 'She's a force of nature. She is so thoughtful, so prepared, so data-driven, and then she takes that and makes things happen,' says Michael Gaito, global chairman of investment banking and health care at JPMorgan, whose firm advised Pharmacyclics in when it was sold to AbbieVie in 2015. Zanganeh negotiated a worldwide partnership with J&J that allowed the smaller Pharmacyclics to book the U.S. revenue from the new cancer drug, rather than the typical arrangement in which it would go to the big pharma partner. She also negotiated upfront payments over two years of $400 million. 'The terms of it were revolutionary at the time,' Gaito says. Adds Summit board member Clark: 'She really drove it.' Pharmacyclics' drug, Imbruvica, ended up being a blockbuster treatment for chronic lymphocytic leukemia, one of the most common forms of leukemia in adults. It is far less toxic than the chemotherapy that was the previous standard treatment. A surge in Pharmacyclics' stock price first landed Duggan on Forbes' Billionaires list in 2013, the year Imbruvica got FDA approval. Two years later, drug giant AbbVie bought the company for $21 billion. Zanganeh, who had invested about $1 million in the company, walked away with $225 million before taxes. The cash was especially welcome since it enabled Zanganeh, who had been raising her son, Shaun, on her own, to spend more time being a mom. Back in 2006, when he was born, Zanganeh was traveling so much for work, researching investments with Duggan, that her mother, who lived in France, raised Shaun until he was 5, with Zanganeh flying to France every two weeks to visit. (Duggan recently acknowledged that Shaun is his son.) In 2019, Zanganeh was on a trip to France to visit her father, who was having surgery to remove a cancerous tumor, when she found a lump that turned out to be Stage 2 breast cancer. She had surgery at the same hospital as her dad, then flew home to the U.S., where she started chemotherapy two weeks before Covid-19 lockdowns began in March 2020. It didn't go smoothly: Her heart and lungs practically shut down and she had to be hospitalized. She had bone pain and chronic vomiting. 'I was really, really sick,' she says. 'All of the time, you have this fear. What if it metastasizes?' She says the silver lining was that she got to experience the same challenges as many of the patients her industry exists to serve. During this time, Duggan targeted another struggling biotech. He spent $63 million buying 60% of Summit Therapeutics' shares and became CEO in April 2020. Seven months later, chemo treatments behind her, Zanganeh joined as chief operating officer and board member. In July 2022, she was appointed co-CEO. After initial plans to develop a new antibiotic sputtered, the pair hired a handful of former Pharmacyclics employees and sent them on a quest to find a new cancer drug—anywhere in the world. Fong Clow, a Pharmacyclics veteran originally from China, suggested looking in her home country. In mid-2022 the Summit team zeroed in on ivonescimab, which was made by a Hong Kong–listed firm called Akeso and already in Phase III trials. At the time, there was some hesitation in the industry about partnering with a Chinese drugmaker. In March 2022, the FDA declined to approve a lung cancer drug that Eli Lilly had licensed from China's Innovent Biologics. That's one possible reason Akeso, which had presented some promising research at ASCO, the big annual oncology conference that year, didn't attract big pharma. It wasn't a problem for Zanganeh and Duggan. 'They're just not bound by conventional thinking,' says board member Clark. They were, however, bound by Summit's finances. In September 2022 the company had just over $120 million of cash on hand and a market cap of about $200 million. But Michelle Xia, the founder and CEO of Akeso—who had worked for Bayer and other pharmaceutical companies in the U.S. after getting a Ph.D. in molecular biology in the U.K.—bonded with Zanganeh and Duggan. The two teams quickly discovered they had similar entrepreneurial cultures. 'They found me, and I think it's a perfect fit,' Xia says. In December 2022 the two companies agreed to license Akeso's drug for $500 million upfront (Summit had to borrow from Duggan and Zanganeh to cover the sum) and $4.5 billion in potential milestone payments if ivonescimab gets approved. Zanganeh is optimistic on that front. Ivonescimab is undergoing 11 Phase III trials around the world. Results so far have been mostly positive, though on May 30 the company reported that it missed one of two primary targets–for overall survival–in one of the trials, sending Summit shares plummeting 30% that day. In a June 1 note, Cantor Fitzgerald biotech analyst Eric Schmidt wrote, 'We think the markets got it wrong,' explaining that the trial showed very positive results for the other target, time without disease progression–and that this particular trial is for a small subset of lung cancer patients. As a cancer survivor, Zanganeh knows there is no time to waste. 'The speed of [our] decision making is fast,' she says. 'You want to make sure that you can really help all these patients.' Disclosure: Maky Zanganeh, Summit Therapeutics' co-CEO, published a book in February with Forbes Books, a licensed partner of Forbes.
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Yahoo
Iran escalating persecution of Persian staff and relatives, BBC says
The BBC has again accused Iran of escalating a campaign of intimidation against its Persian journalists and increasingly targeting the relatives of staff inside the country. The British broadcaster said on Monday that its BBC Persian journalists were witnessing "a disturbing rise in the persecution of their family members". People had endured random interrogations, travel bans, passport confiscations and asset seizure threats, it said. Staff - both in the UK and elsewhere - had not been able to return to Iran, and had also been directly targeted with violence and threats aimed at pressuring them to abandon their work, the BBC said. "We call on the Iranian authorities to immediately cease this campaign of intimidation," the BBC's director general Tim Davie said in a statement on Monday. Tehran is yet to respond to the latest allegations from the BBC. The Iranian regime has previously been accused of conducting unlawful operations against journalists abroad. It has denied those allegations and accused the BBC of spreading false information to encourage its overthrow. BBC News Persian reaches a weekly global audience of almost 22 million people, including around 13 million in Iran, where the service is banned. The BBC has previously said that the Iranian regime has targeted its Persian language journalists covering the country over the past decade - prompting the broadcaster to lodge urgent complaints with the UN Human Rights Council in 2018 and again in 2022. But there had been a "significant and increasingly alarming escalation" recently, the BBC said on Monday. "In addition to enduring personal security threats from Iranian state actors operating beyond Iran's borders, BBC News Persian journalists are now witnessing a disturbing rise in the persecution of their family members inside Iran," said BBC Director-General Tim Davie. "This persecution is a direct assault on press freedom and human rights. It must end now." The broadcaster said it was preparing a fresh complaint to the UN. The UN's secretary general and its special rapporteurs have previously raised concerns about Iran's treatment of BBC staff and warned that harassment, surveillance and death threats violated international human rights law.
