Why we stopped, and why we are back
In July 2012, from a small room in Hyderabad, we sent out the first issue of 5Talents. I wrote in that editorial that many of us have been told "you are good for nothing," and that the answer to that lie is to find what God has actually put in your hands. We took the name from Matthew 25. The two servants who were praised were not the most gifted. They were the ones who used what they had.
We did eighteen issues. About five thousand people subscribed. Every month we put an Indian talent on one cover and someone from abroad on the next: a worship leader from Hyderabad, a puppet-maker, a pianist from Chennai, a songwriter from the United States. Then, in the middle of 2014, we stopped.
People have asked me why. Some have asked, more carefully, whether God stopped it. So let me answer both questions, since the magazine is coming back and you deserve to know what happened to it.
What actually happened
Our first daughter was born in 2014. A monthly magazine is a monthly workload; it does not care that you have not slept. We were two people doing interviews, writing, design, subscriptions and the accounts, and one of those two people was now feeding a baby at three in the morning. Something had to give, and it was the magazine.
That is the simple version. The full version has more in it.
The magazine was a PDF. In 2012 that was fine, because our readers opened it on a desktop. By 2014 India had moved to the mobile phone, and our own analytics told us the story: people were still opening the email, but they were not reading. A twenty-four-page A4 layout on a five-inch screen is a punishment, not a magazine. We knew this and we did not know how to fix it.
We hosted the PDF on a free reader service. When they introduced a paid version we could not afford it, and the free version began surrounding our Christian magazine with advertisements for pornographic magazines. Readers wrote to us about it. We had no answer for them.
In 2013 our website, 5talents.in, was hacked and redirected to a pornographic site. We registered 5talentsmag.com to get away from it. I will just say that running a Christian publication in India is not always a simple thing.
So: a new baby, a format that had stopped working, a platform that was embarrassing us, and a website that had been taken from us. None of those was fatal alone. Together, in 2014, they were.
That was not quite the end. In January 2017, after two and a half years, we tried again. A nineteenth issue came out, twenty-four pages, under a slightly different name: FiveTalents Magazine. The editorial was called "New year, New start!" I meant it. But the same arithmetic was waiting for us, the same two people and the same workload and the same format, and after that issue it stopped again. I am telling you this because the archive will show it to you anyway, and because a magazine that is honest about its false starts is worth more than one that pretends it only failed once.
Did God stop it?
I do not think so. I think God does not stop the work he starts; but I also think he is not in a hurry, and we were.
Some things need rest and a proper time. A field left fallow is not a field that has failed. When I look at what we did not have in 2014 and what we have now, I do not see a ministry that died. I see one that was set down because the people carrying it needed to grow.
In the years between, our children grew up. We travelled and worked in places we had never expected to see. We went through serious leadership training. We started PS.Today and TunedUp.one. The vision that fitted into eighteen issues does not fit there anymore, and that is a good problem.
And the technology changed under us again, this time in our favour. Most of what broke us in 2014 was labour: layout, distribution, subscription lists, the hundred small jobs that eat a week. A great deal of that is now handled by tools that did not exist then, including the AI assistance that helped me sort through four hundred pages of our own archive this summer. Two people with a baby could not run a monthly. Two people with the tools of 2026 can run a website that publishes every week.
I will be honest: I am still confused by how fast things change, and I do not enjoy it. But I have stopped fighting it. The message does not change. The format does.
What comes back in January
Every issue from 2012 to 2017 is already on the website. We have gone through each piece, checked where it came from, and written to the people who wrote for us. A few articles are being held until we have permission or until we are sure they are ours. That is the right thing to do and we should have done it the first time.
From January there will be new work: one cover story a month, and as many other pieces as we have worth publishing. We are looking hard for new talent, especially the young ones, from the hills and the small towns as much as from the metros. If you know someone, or you are someone, write to us.
But 5Talents is no longer only a talent search. In 2012 we had one question: who is using their gift for the Kingdom? That question stays. Around it we are building a wider magazine, because the readers we want to serve need more than a monthly profile.
Christian entrepreneurs will have a place to show what they are building. Running a business as a believer in India is a talent too, and one nobody writes about. We will review Christian books, music, apps and products, honestly, so you know what is worth your money before you spend it. We will cover conferences and events, not just announce them, so that the person who could not travel still gets what was said. And we will carry a calendar of what is coming up, across churches and cities, in one place.
Some of this will be free. Some of it, the event listings and the entrepreneur showcase, will be how the magazine pays for itself, and we will always label what is sponsored so you never have to wonder. We closed in 2014 partly because we could not afford a reader without adverts for pornography on it. This time the magazine will stand on its own feet, openly.
The people who carried it
A magazine is never two people, whatever the editorial says. Before I close, I want to name the ones who carried 5Talents from 2012 to 2017, because most of them never got thanked in print.
Rev. K. Stephen of Sharon Prayer Fellowship inaugurated the first issue at Sharon Church on 1 July 2012 and stood behind us as advisor from the first page, with Rev. Ms. M. G. Basanti alongside him. Deepakshi, my wife, did the interviews that made the covers worth reading, and then did them again while expecting our daughter. Pankaj Kumar Nayak designed the early issues. Elizabeth Clayton was there from the first issue to the last, first as creative manager and then as creative director; nobody gave more hours to this magazine than she did. And every writer who sent us a piece for nothing but a byline: thank you.
Two names need a paragraph of their own. Bill and Elveera Redwood came to us in 2013, Elveera as editor-in-chief and Bill running advertising and marketing through Shiloh Global Solutions. Bill is the reason Stephen Devassy was on our first anniversary cover. But what they gave me was bigger than any single issue. I was a young man who would rather sit at a desk than walk into a room. They pushed me to meet people I would never have approached, put me on the stage at business conferences to speak about the magazine, and told me, more times than I deserved, that this thing was worth doing. Much of what I know about standing in front of people and asking for something, I learned because they refused to let me hide. If 5Talents has a second life, part of the credit is theirs.
Fourteen years ago I wrote: don't hide your talents. I still mean it. This time we mean to keep saying it.
Premasis Satman
Executive Director, 5Talents Magazine
Premasis Satman
Founder and Executive Director of 5Talents Magazine, writing from Hyderabad. He has written the magazine's editorial column since the first issue in July 2012.