The dramas in Colombo are endless, where dramas seem to take place more off stage than on stage.  As always, the hypocrisy of being nice to the face and talking behind the person’s back is a national pastime and the plotting and planning seems endless.

The latest is a sudden upheaval about a cookie advertisement on TV.

No one in Colombo would have bothered about it. But the righteous lot in Colombo had to share their disgust over it via social media and it went viral.  

My curiosity was aroused and I decided to watch this commercial.  The storyline was of a man visiting a the home of the woman proposed to him in marriage and being attracted to the proposed woman’s sister since her complexion was fairer. When this was discussed with the marriage broker he suggested that the fairer sister was diving into the white puff cookies and hence the resultant fairer skin. I found this advertisement to be quite hysterical and am sure that many would have swallowed the myth and had a few packets of white puffs.
 
I felt that it was a very well put together commercial depicting what happens in this country where parents seek a lovely fair skinned bride for their “ratharan putha”.  Any match maker will vouch that a fair bride is a specific detail  to look out for in addition to caste and that all fat dowry.

I dare say the advertisement was promoting the advantages of being white, but we live in a country where salons thrive on bleaching treatments, consumers buy products to make them fairer, the mother who feels sorry for her son who is very dark in complexion, calling him sudu putha and it goes on. The strange thing is that when reality is slapped on one’s face everyone starts having a hissy fit.

The bottom line is that the commercial certainly got over and above undue attention and our Colombo types who claim they do not eat local products and who never watch local television channels got to know about the biscuit. Clever it seems and one wonders whether the advertising company that produced the advertisement set the trap up to create all this attention. Whatever. The entire nation now knows about this product thanks to all the negative publicity it has received.

As for the notorious biscuit, I tried it and it is a dammed fine product.