Saturday, September 23, 2006

one bedo'oh campaign

TV doesn’t always make you laugh. But when it does, it is certainly hilarious.

I had a good laugh at the latest reading campaign, the ‘Bangsa Membaca Bangsa Berjaya’ advertisement. But don’t get me wrong, I was not at any time laughing at the concept or the urge to us all to be part of a nation of bookworms. I was only laughing at the lack of common sense or if I am to call spade a spade, the stupidity of it.

People reading on the park bench? Okay. Never mind if it is thirty over degrees out there.

People reading while walking in the mall? Still okay. Maybe they are going through the sales catalogues.

People reading in the LRT? Hardly seen but still plausibly okay. I hardly get a seat on LRT these days unless I want to do an 'Adlin' (of the other politeness campaign advert).

But people reading on the escalator? My goodness. It is exactly what Terengganuans would say as ‘bedo’oh!’.

[Bedo’oh, is Terengganu adaptation of Arabic ‘bidaah’, which literally means overdoing a good thing to the point it is becoming excessive and thus from Islamic perspective, forbidden]

I bet whomever did the advert don’t him or herself read. If he does, he would know that the ride on the escalator takes not much more than a minute, and you have to watch your steps, Watch as you step on to it, watch as the tread levels to the upper floor and carefully steps out. A misstep could cause you to fall and if you happen to fall backwards, cause others to go tumbling with you. That leaves you with just a fraction of a minute. So what can you read in that several seconds? Somebody has to tell the good doctor that reading on escalator is DANGEROUS.

Want another laugh? Check out the titles of the books they were reading.

This is the kind of thing that I think censorship board should do well to also look into. I said ‘also’ because this is the kind of bad influence that people should be protected from. Of course this ‘national agenda’ advertisement needed no censorship approval, but somebody approving it must have at least the basic decency to take a look at it.

Ah! Maybe they didn’t even look at it.

Maybe also they had a good look at it but didn’t realize that it was for a ‘reading’ campaign. Ha ha ….

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