TheSmartLocal’s ‘beyond offensive’ Deepavali video upsets many Singaporean Indians

UPDATE: TSL responded to our report saying that they have realised their mistake and will be making a public apology soon.

“It was our intention to create a video celebrating Deepavali. But because of poor execution on our part, we ended up doing the opposite. We removed the video as soon as we realised our mistake and this is a big learning lesson we’ll take with us moving forward.

We’ll be preparing a public apology that will be posted up today. We apologise again for this mistake and we will not be producing content like this again.” – The Smart Local

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Some local Indians are up in arms over a Deepavali special video thesmartlocal (TSL) uploaded to their Youtube channel. TSL, a lifestyle blog which describes itself as a blog which does “Travel, Food, Hotel, Shopping and Lifestyle reviews by local experts who share information on everything imaginable in Singapore”, has since taken down the video. A google search however shows that the website intended the video to be a Deepavali special.

The video was made private in Youtube before this publication could view it, but from the comments of Facebook user Pooja Nansi who called the video out, we understand that the website compared ‘laddoo’, a popular Indian sweet, to diarrhoea. Pooja took issue that TSL wished Indians ‘Happy Deepavali’ after being hurtful for 5 minutes and 22 seconds (the length of the video).
Facebook user Reena Subramaniam suggested that the website should have done proper research and should have gotten actual Indians to explain the different Indian foods.