Rejected by ST Forum
Insensitive advertising
I refer to the advertisement, "Wow! My Old Mattress is Worth up to $200" [Life, Jul 20], which shows a Hindu ascetic readying to trade in his nail bed for a Four Star mattress.
The advertisement, to all intents and purposes, is in pretty poor taste: to portray an ascetic, who has taken a lifelong vow to attain God through intense dispassion, hankering after materialistic things like some cheap mattress, is, to say the least, going from sublime to the ridiculous. Should the advertiser have such low confidence of his own product to take advantage of Hinduism's proverbial tolerance? How is it that the Straits Times allowed an insult of this magnitude to appear in its papers regularly?
It is cruel irony that at the time when the Singapore schools are celebrating the Racial Harmony Day, we have advertisements of this type in a major daily.
Selvakumar s/o Prakasam