A few corrections are in order to the said article.
ISLAMABAD: This is with reference to Avirook Sen’s article of September 16 titled “Ads that subtract”. A few corrections are in order to the said article. But before that a few generalisations by Mr Sen need to be pointed out. For instance, he said that the advert “has been roundly ridiculed in the West” but he does not really offer any evidence of this. I should point out, also, that most articles on the web that are critical of this advertisement happen to be on Indian websites. Also, calling a nation of 180 million people “a small country” is factually incorrect. Then there is the claim that The Wall Street Journal had “no qualms dissing it on the internet”. This is incorrect as well because the paper has been quoted as saying that it does not comment on advertisements. As for The New York Times, it did not, as the writer claims, reject the ad but had said that it needed to know who was paying for it.
Iqbal Yousuf
Published in The Express Tribune, September 17th, 2011.
