Some people have their Amir Liaquats and Shahid Masoods to get their content fix, others have their Eva Zu Beck.

Eva is a travel blogger of Polish descent who followed her passion of discovering adventures in places that she hadn’t seen. She is the woman from the famous Keke challenge carried out in a PIA aircraft for Independence Day celebrations. And she is the one whom Pakistan’s post-millenials defended as if she were their prime minister.

“Pakistan was the second stop in my travel log,” narrates Eva, who had left home in January 2018 to travel the world. But she fell in love with Pakistan and has not left since.

As videologging gains popularity among the young in Pakistan, certain local superstars of the medium are emerging

“My friend invited me to come and see [Pakistan] for myself since unfortunately we do not hear much positivity in the Western media,” she says. “It was truly eye-opening and I realised that there is a huge opportunity to talk about Pakistan to the outside world, that anyone can travel to Pakistan and that it is beautiful and people here are most hospitable.”

In a few months, Eva began uploading her travel logs on social media and her audience began to swell. And slowly but surely, she began attracting a huge Pakistani audience. Eva has a presence on Facebook, Instagram and YouTube, and her recent posts have mostly been about the ways and wonders of Pakistan.

It is no coincidence that Pakistani’s generation Z have taken to Eva. The way she is putting content out there is, in fact, ideally suited to Pakistani youth, who no longer read long articles and certainly don’t approve of wordy chunks of text. Personal blogging or the written word used to be the rave in the late 1990s and early 2000s — with ordinary souls writing out their daily journals or perspectives and sharing it with other people. But perhaps the habit of reading was peculiar to millennials, post-millenials are more into watching videos.

And so, from the embers of personal blogging, came vlogging or video logging — the idea of logging one’s thoughts or experiences in video form. Some did it to express their inner thoughts, others provided their analysis on society and politics. Brands soon entered the scene, too, shedding the baggage of written content and in some cases even advertising. They realised that to attract more consumers, brands needed people that others trusted and could influence decisions. And with the reach of social media almost always growing, Gen Z have certainly taken to vlogging as their way of receiving content.

In fact, distributing content online has exploded as a practice since the advent of YouTube. Content creators can now reach tens of thousands of people quickly and without any hindrances. The unfortunate ban on YouTube in Pakistan for many years suppressed many artistically-gifted people from expressing themselves. As the ban on YouTube was removed, social media celebrities began to emerge and today, many of them are public figures in their own right.

In recent times, Pakistan has seen content creators such as The Idiotz, Bekaar Films and Karachi Vynz, who are credited with mainstreaming online skits in Pakistan. The two superstars, however, are Taimur Salahuddin (alias Mooroo) and Irfan Junejo, whose style of storytelling is intriguing to say the least. While Mooroo has been busy setting his studio these days, Junejo has been travelling the country looking for stories of hope and has made an advertisement on an upcoming cellular brand.

“Vlogging is most fun since I can act, sing and write,” explains Mooroo, also a gifted musician and a tech lover. “I have an audience who cares about my work and it’s growing.”

Irfan is the self-taught and self-motivated and passionate boy next door. Mooroo is the senior of the two — Junejo started making YouTube videos on New Year’s Day in 2016, while Mooroo already had a footprint in the industry. Mooroo has been Irfan’s inspiration and Mooroo returns the compliment by saying, “Junejo is a great collaborator, artist and motivator. Our relationship started as him being my fan and now I’m his.”

Junejo has gone from his white-walled room and coaching football to local kids to travelling in a chartered plane with the likes of footballer Ronaldinho. His faith and confidence in his work has landed him coveted deals and collaborations with multinationals. His recent collaboration with the Islamabad United Club in the PSL 2018 has given a much needed boost to the local art scene and sporting hopefuls.

The two share a subscriber count of more than half-a-million and growing and get boos and applause alike on their content and discuss feedback via Instagram live or recorded sessions. They are travel buddies and like to buy new boy toys while their videos wrestle for views and top trending spots. Despite such a big army of followers behind them, many of whom idolise them, Mooroo and Irfan don’t want the celebrity tag and often refer to their fans as ‘friends.’ They hope to bring a positive change in our society through their cameras.

“Humour is a part of my personality so it makes its way into my vlogs,” explains Mooroo. “A vlog is an expression of your personality. If you are a serious person, your vlogs will be serious. If humour is a facet of your personality, then humour will make its way into your vlogs.”

But Mooroo has gone beyond simply recording his thoughts. He also launched a web-series called Sayay (Shadows) which has been well- received by his audience. “Sayay is a continuing web series,” he says. “I have character arcs plotted for about six seasons. I will keep making them over the years before I move on to other web series.”

Clearly, the scope of vlogging is greater than simply happy faces and forced smiles.

“I haven’t brought about any real change yet,” says Junejo, “apart from this charity school that got a lot of help from a local youth club after they watched my video on it. I never intentionally portray a beautiful image of Pakistan but I do portray a real image of it. If I am travelling and an incident takes place, I usually make it a part of my video. What’s lacking though is the access to those places and marketing those places to an international audience.”

What Irfan is not a fan of, however, is how the corporate world is dealing with artists and content creators at a different wavelength and wishes to change that but, thus far, has been quite unsuccessful. Mooroo, too, hates the expectation from an artist to work for free as it compromises the dignity of art.

“An artist’s worth can be boiled down to money but our society does not understand the value of it,” says Mooroo. “Marketers do and they disproportionately exploit it. Marketers want to get into where people’s attention is, so they can plug in brands there. This attention has value, and when we are starting out we don’t understand the value of that attention. I feel it my duty to point out that worth to my peers at times.”

With both men reliant monetarily on their vlogs to sustain themselves, what if YouTube is banned in Pakistan again?

“We make more money from sponsorships than YouTube monetisation,” explains Mooroo. “I have been there when YouTube was banned and sustained myself through those times. My main success happened when there was no YouTube in Pakistan.”

For Junejo, there really isn’t a Plan B. “I’ll probably focus on Facebook and Vimeo or some other site for video content. My audience is mostly on YouTube so I hope they don’t ban it again.”

Meanwhile, Eva also actively follows Pakistani content creators especially Junejo, Mooroo and Ukhano on social media. “I wish to collaborate with these creative people,” she says, “and to work with the hidden young talent in Pakistan and to bring them forward as well.”

Published in Dawn, EOS, October 28th, 2018

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