I joined three Pakistani sites in three stages soon after 26/11. It was an intense desire to find out what sort of people would send out an armed party to attack civilians and a country totally defenceless and at peace at the time. The three sites were All Things Pakistan, run by a very charming professor from Boston University, who later came back to Pakistan to direct LUMS, before returning to the US once more; about a year later, PakTeaHouse, founded by Raza Rumi, but then being run by a group of two or three young people, with Yassir Latif Hamdani chief among them; and finally PDF, quite some time after joining PakTeaHouse.
ATP was a mild shock, as I found a great deal in common with the people there; they were not the narrow-minded bigots I had feared. Far from it, some of them were so close to my thinking that we became friends and remained friends; it is now nine years, and we are members of a very small mailing list, where there are four Pakistani and four Indian members. Two members have dropped out. At any rate, in ATP, my reception was so friendly that in time, it became a home from home, and it became clear to me that there was no black-and-white answer to the question of the troubled relations between the two countries; in addition, that there were Pakistanis to whom I felt closer than to some Indians. These latter, the Hindutvavadi, Internet Hindu types, soon started encroaching in larger and larger numbers, and finally drove four of us away to another site, which two among us knew, and this was the wonderful PakTeaHouse. I left ATP sadly; it was such a collection of gentlemen, including some who were quite hostile to India, but unfailingly polite to Indians. I believe that we were deserving of such courtesy, in those early days before the rats flocked in.
PakTeaHouse was wonderful. There is no other word for it. Some of the discussion there would have fitted into a post-graduate seminar quite comfortably. The leader was a very young, but very thoroughly well-informed YLH, but a smallish group of about seven of us interacted with him and discovered by dialogue and mutually critical analysis many unsuspected truths about the events before partition and independence. At PTH, I was one among the few who warned RR of the dire consequences of not restricting comment, and of not disciplining trolls; he, being ultra-liberal, took no notice. As a result, it is today a charnel-house. The people there have probably all come from Chowk, although some of them would have startled even Chowk diehards. By then, one of my friends, an ex-Air Force man, had told me about this forum, and although I was sceptical, having looked at Bharat Rakshak and formed a very poor opinion about it, I took his advice at face value and joined. And here I am, on the verge of departure, for exactly the same reasons as I left two other Pakistani sites; too many obnoxious trolls.
And, yes, many more hostile Pakistanis than I've ever seen before in one place.
Both young and old.
They aren't pleasant to me, as it happens.
