On Thursday 21 Jul 2011 11:53:28 pm [email protected] wrote: > We need somebody from Pakistan in here. Ideas? >
I have been on a wildly jingoistic, largely right wing Indian defence forum which is very popular. About a decade ago there were similar calls on the forum that "We need a Pakistani viewpoint". What became of that is a different story that is not relevant here but my observations on the issue of Pakistanis on English language internet fora provoked some study and some thoughts about that subset of Indians and Pakistanis who actually communicate in English. Like I said - the English speaking groups are a sub-set of the populations of the two nations. Statistics about how many English readers or speakers there are are reasonably easily available from India but are more difficult to access from Pakistan. A lot of Information Technology promotion sites frm Pakistan claim a huge number of English speakers who (it was believed) would give the Indian BPO sector a run for its money. But after repeated and much digging I discovered that the total circulation of English newspapers in Pakistan in the year 2000 was about 150,000 for a population of 134 million (at that time) More recently - there was a burgeoning of TV channels in Pakistan and I recall the observation that there was only one English language TV channel in Pakistan out of a several score channels. My conclusion was that it will be extremely difficult to get a Pakistani viewpoint on here. Apart from the Pakistani press (whcih I follow closely) the other places that give me some inkling into Pakistani thought are a Pakistani "liberal" blog, which is also frequented by another silklister, and a Pakistani jinoistic military forum. Of late I have also taken to analysing Pakistani comments on dozens of videos I have on a YouTube channel. Some of them gets more hits from Pakistan than any other country. It is interesting (to me) that a large number of Pakistani comments are in Urdu or Punjabi using the English script. Comments from Indians are more often in English than in any Indian language. shiv
