KARACHI: The Yorkshire Adabee Forum will help people meet social media stars and help those stars to reach a larger platform.

This was said by the forum’s secretary Madiha Ansari at a press conference at the Karachi Press Club on Wednesday.

Madiha introduced a young social media personality, Mansoor Qureshi, to journalists, saying his group, Karachi Vines, had a fan following of more than 300,000 subscribers on the Internet. She said there were new trends which had made social media have a wider reach as Mansoor’s videos were seen all across the world though he had no recognition in the mainstream media.

Mansoor said he had been struggling for five years to get his work accepted on television channels. It was only when he and his team started making ‘relatable content’ on the Internet that his work was acknowledged, and now he had more than 300,000 people who liked and followed their videos. He told the media that the Yorkshire Adabee Forum had helped him organise an event at the Rangoonwala Hall on Sept 27.

Chairperson of the forum Ghazal Ansari said the forum had been part of the Arts Council Karachi’s Urdu Conference for the past five years. Despite being based in the UK, the group tried to promote things which were to do with good Urdu. That was why, she said, after watching so many acts on the Internet the forum liked what Mansoor’s team was doing, especially with respect to the Urdu language.

In response to a question Madiha Ansari said these days most people were connected to the web through their (smart)phones. As opposed to the mainstream media, anyone could have access to the Internet. “Social media has no doors,” she remarked. She added that not only one could acquire instant recognition through it, but could also earn money by virtue of advertising.

Answering the question that why he wanted to get into the mainstream media if he had such a big following on the Internet, Mansoor said social media in Pakistan was not yet in a position to help artists earn a living; whereas the mainstream media could.

Replying to another question Madiha said though what Mansoor did was not exactly work of literature, it’s the language that he used which in a way attracted the forum to him. She said that’s what the youth wing of the forum in Yorkshire was doing in the UK, trying to familiarise the youth with their culture and language.

Published in Dawn, September 24th, 2015

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