Picture of the Day: ATP is 6 Months Old Today

Adil Najam, Owais Mughal, Bilal Zuberi

All Things Pakistan (ATP) turns six-months old today.

The very first post on the old (wordpress.com) address was posted on June 11; we celebrated our 100th post on July 16; on August 18 we expanded our core team; and we moved to this new domain and address on September 1.

We keep celebrating these milestones (hopefully) not because we are self-obsessed, but because in many ways we are ourselves surprised by the wonderful roller-coaster ride this has been … and remains. This is the 356th post on the blog, over 30 authors have contributed posts, and nearly 6000 comments have been posted (despite our fairly heavy moderation which culls out a significant number of inappropriate ones); over these six months, our sites (this and the old one) have received some 366,000+ hits; we now routinely get around 1000-1200 individual visits and around 2500-3000 page views per day.

We are thankful to our readers for all of this. But as we have said before, we are even more thankful that a now vibrant community has begun to develop around ATP and its core concept of Pakistaniat.

ATP is an inclusive, but not a monolithic, community. We have our differences (boy, do we!). Sometimes passions flare. Occasionally, people cross boundaries they should not. But, for most part, we have been able to maintain a reasoned and reasonable discussion. For this, we are thankful to all of you.

This has sometimes meant restraining our enthusiasms, learning to disagree without being disagreeable, exercising our own right to opinion by respecting others’ right to the same. Our intent was always to create a community of discussions; but not of rants. The one thing we do not wish to become is another ‘board’ where those on the extreme shout out all others by turning the assumed anonymity of the Internet into a license for battameezi.

We try to make ATP a welcoming space for all views and all discussions. But we have also had to work hard in keeping the language clean, the tone reasonable, and the substance relevant. Most of all, we have tried and will keep on trying, to keep the blog and its discussions staunchly Pakistan-focused – on all aspects of Pakistan, and for all Pakistanis.

Most of all, we are thankful to our readers who have share these values of community. We apologize to those few whose passions we have had to restrain through occasional moderation. We thank those many who have helped create a sense of community. In a community, you do not always agree, but you are always respectful of each other.

We owe a particular debt of gratitude to those who have been with us from the early days; they have literally defined what this blog is by their comments, in many cases by their contribution, and most of all by their regular visitation. We are thankful to all those who have joined us along the way, and keep doing so. We hope that they will also take the time to explore earlier posts (especially by exploring the categories and other archive tools).

Finally, we are thankful for the growth that we have experienced, but growth was never our primary ambition. We measure, and will continue to measure, our success not by the number of readers we attract, but by the strength of community we can foster; not by the ferocity of the debates we generate, but by the commitment to ‘Pakistaniat’ in all its varied dimensions. We hope that we will have your continued support and enthusiasm in fulfilling this mission.