March 27, 2011

Finding the right mix

One of the reasons that blogging is so important to bloggers is because it helps to put out their views into a massive world where even those people who wouldn't normally listen to you, end up reading you. And one of the best parameters to gauge how popular your views are is to check out how many comments, or lack of comments, your views and opinions generate.

Normally I don't get many comments for my blog posts. The most responses I get are for controversial topics, such as Raymond Davis, or Imran Khan. With Imran Khan his loyalists keep reminding how great he is. With Raymond Davis, the local population supported my idea that he deserves to be punished whilst the foreigners kept doubting the Pakistani government's intentions. But the other part to this conundrum, like I mentioned before, is the lack of comments.

When I conducted some online research I came to know that a vast majority of the population does not comment when they feel they have nothing important to contribute to the discussion; in other words, when they agree with your views. This sounded too good to be true - I mean, it is impossible that out of the 198 posts that I've written, people only disagree with a handful of them? - so I laboriously continued on. Another reason that leads to people not commenting is because the content on a particular site is not interesting enough for them.

Of course this blog isn't as mainstream as I would like it to be. And even more so because it creates content that appeals to very few people in the world. Politics, current affairs, the state of affairs of Pakistan are areas which do not interest the homegrown population much. In fact they would much rather I talked about Indian movies and actresses. That way they might feel as if they have something to contribute to my views.

But I'm not interested in Indian movies and their actresses and their tangled love lives. I am more interested about getting out a point of view that is devoid of hypocrisy; I want people to see through a lens that looks at our flaws and attempts to identify them so that they can be fixed instead of concealing them.

Now I know for a fact that there are many blogs and websites out their which advocate the exact opposite; which preach that everything wrong with Pakistan is because the world is after us. They make no practical sense, and involve some of the most awesome theories, which if they weren't so illogical, would make for some awesome scripts of thriller movies and suspense novels.

But that is the point; while the majority silently hides behind a façade of rhetoric that blames everything from the west to the east for our problems, there is an even silent-er minority which looks at things as they are; which tries to look at the whole picture objectively.

Maybe it's a good thing then that few people comment on my blog posts. At least I know they are from that minority that refuses to buy the venom being spewed by most of the people in this country that simply refuses to acknowledge there is anything wrong with us.