New York: An advertisement for clothing label GAP featuring a Sikh model was vandalised with racist comments on a city subway station in New York, eliciting strong reactions from netizens.
The GAP ad features renowned Indian-American actor and designer Waris Ahluwahlia along with filmmaker Quentin Jones with the hashtag `Make Love`.
However, the ad was vandalised and the words `Make Love` were scratched and replaced with the words `Make Bombs` and `Please stop Driving Taxis` was scribbled across the ad, a clear allusion to the large number of taxi drivers in the city who are Sikhs.
A report in the Daily Beast said international human rights lawyer Arsalan Iftikhar pointed out the vandalism to GAP through a tweet. The clothing company promptly responded expressing gratitude for bringing the incident to its notice and asked for the exact location of the subway where the ad was vandalised.
GAP currently has the ad featuring Ahluwalia as its Twitter background photo.
"The moral of this story is to prove yet again that we certainly do not yet live in a `post-racial America` since minorities like South Asians (or other brown folks perceived to be Muslim or Arab) cannot even grace fashion advertisements without having nasty racial epithets hurled their way," Iftikhar said.
"But companies like GAP are doing a great job forging a path for minority and under-represented fashion models (like Waris Ahluwahlia above) who do not conveniently fit into our traditional American notions of beauty and actually challenge how we have superficially defined those terms since our country`s existence". GAP has launched a `Make Love` campaign which shows couples from diverse backgrounds posing together to spread the message of unity and harmony.