By Premlata and Kollengode Venkataraman
For the past twenty-five years we have been publishing the Pittsburgh Patrika without missing our own self-imposed deadlines. When we started the magazine, we were parents of two teenage daughters and were agonizing over our aging parents in India. And we brought out the magazine every three months, working on this in our spare time while holding onto our full-time jobs that involved frequent work-related travels.
We managed to keep our publication schedules through the graduations of our daughters, their weddings, and the birth of our grandchildren. Even more so, through the prolonged Final Exits of our beloved parents.
But this January issue is delayed by a month in spite of our best efforts. To prove the adage that life happens as we make plans for it, events just happened. Just as we were getting ready during the Thanksgiving holidays to put together our December issue, we were presented with retirement options at work, with the rider that we should make our decisions in two weeks. Weighing our options occupied all our attention in November through January, even though we were preparing to make this transition on our own towards the end of 2020.
Our situation was compounded by our month-long trip to India in December with our daughters, their husbands and our grandchildren, which was planned in late summer. This travel coming right in the midst of the festival season in India overwhelmed us with decisions that left little time to finish up the magazine before we left for India.
Both of us are now retired as of January 2020, after all the excitements of completing paperwork, handing over responsibilities, farewell parties and bidding goodbye to a lifetime of relationships at work.
In this new climate, we are re-dedicating ourselves to keep publishing The Pittsburgh Patrika as long as our readers expect us to do, and our advertisers support us for paying the bills.
As always, your participation with writing articles and helping us in any way possible will help us keep the magazine coming to you without fail and with no cost to you. Looking forward to bring more exciting issues ahead. END ï®