Pakistani Twitter star goes offline, fans worry

Electronic cries of anguish are ringing out across Pakistan’s Twitter community over the abrupt disappearance of the popular satirist @MajorlyProfound, beloved for his acid commentary on the powerful and their prejudices.

Electronic cries of anguish are ringing out across Pakistan’s Twitter community over the abrupt disappearance of the popular satirist @MajorlyProfound, beloved for his acid commentary on the powerful and their prejudices. The unexplained closing of his Twitter account and a related blog on August 4 has become the cybermystery of the moment among English-speaking Pakistani liberals.

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Channeling the American comic Stephen Colbert, the determinedly anonymous blogger behind @MajorlyProfound adopted the voice of a pompous, paranoid, honor-obsessed nationalist, then took things a step or three further. The result was a searingly funny and often jet-black perspective on Pakistan’s rolling crises.

His jagged wit won @MajorlyProfound more than 10,000 followers on Twitter, many of them influential in the Pakistani and Indian news media. Foreign journalists started to quote him in stories, sensing he had become a cultural touchstone of sorts.

But the man behind the phenomenon assiduously shunned the spotlight. “I’m just a nobody,” he wrote in an email exchange before his disappearance. “I like to poke fun at absurdity.”