{"id":95565,"date":"2019-11-24T00:18:04","date_gmt":"2019-11-24T06:18:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/?p=95565"},"modified":"2019-11-23T17:12:25","modified_gmt":"2019-11-24T00:12:25","slug":"colonial-mindset-of-supermarket-companies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/2019\/11\/24\/colonial-mindset-of-supermarket-companies\/","title":{"rendered":"Colonial mindset of supermarket companies"},"content":{"rendered":"<h2><span style=\"color: #0000ff;\"><em><strong data-rich-text-format-boundary=\"true\">By Janaka Perera<\/strong><\/em><\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n<p>Throughout every Christmas season, customers at supermarkets in Sri Lanka can hear Christmas hymns being sung and the staff wearing red Santa Claus caps, though not all the staff may be Christians.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This no doubt is commercializing religion but why force-feed it on non-Christians too \u2013 both employees and customers?\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u00a0During Buddhist and Hindu festivals however, we hear neither chanting of Buddhist sutras nor Hindu devotional songs at these same supermarkets.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Are we still a European colony?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>We can understand if this is confined only to December 24-25.\u00a0\u00a0But why continue it for over a month until the festive season ends?\u00a0\u00a0This does not happen in Western countries to my knowledge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Is\nnot forcing non-Christian employees to wear Santa Claus costumes a violation of\nhuman rights?&nbsp;&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>&nbsp;Getting the female staff to wear cloth and jacket\nduring the Sinhala-Tamil New Year is quite different since it a national\nfestival according to ancient traditions \u2013 not a religious festival as such.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>We\u00a0do not mind Sri Lankan supermarkets having Christmas trees during the season provided they have Vesak Lanterns during Vesak and maybe some Hindu symbols during Hindu festivals at least in areas where Hindus are in the majority.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>By Janaka Perera Throughout every Christmas season, customers at supermarkets in Sri Lanka can hear Christmas hymns being sung and the staff wearing red Santa Claus caps, though not all the staff may be Christians.\u00a0 This no doubt is commercializing religion but why force-feed it on non-Christians too \u2013 both employees and customers?\u00a0 \u00a0During Buddhist [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":true,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[82],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-95565","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-janaka-perera"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95565","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=95565"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95565\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=95565"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=95565"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=95565"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}