Srinagar coaching centre goofs up with pics of Pak terror victim, comedian in ad
In a major embarrassment for a coaching institute in Srinagar, a newspaper ad on the performance of its students in NEET and JEE carried pictures of two Pakistanis, including a dead schoolboy.
Mug shots of a school boy, one among the over 140 school kids killed in a deadly terrorist attack at a school in Peshawar in 2014, and a successful Pakistani-Canadian comedian featured in a full-page ad about a coaching centre’s successful candidates in national engineering and medical entrance exams.
A full-page ad by Srinagar’s HOPE Classes in Saturday’s edition Greater Kashmir was meant to congratulate its 37 successful candidates in NEET 2017 (medical entrance) and 53 in the JEE Mains 2017.
But the ad has gone horribly wrong. Both the list feature students Mohd Yaqoob and Irfan Ahmad -- and Yaqoob’s mug-shot is that of Mohammad Yaseen, killed in Peshawar school attack and Ahmad’s photo is that of Shahveer Jafry, a Pakistani comedian and video artiste.
The ad has, one the one hand, led to hilarious reactions on social media while many parents have raised concerns on whether such coaching centres add names of fake students to their list of successful candidates to boost its reputation.
HOPE Classes owned up the terrible mistake.
“It was a mistake by a designer employed by us. Actually, photos of all the successful candidates had not arrived so he perhaps inserted available photos. It’s a mistake and in tomorrow’s newspapers we will publish a corrigendum apologising for this mistake,” a senior official of the institute told HT.
The JEE Mains and NEET results site both require a candidate’s roll number and date of birth to check his or her result. The advertisement did not mention any such details of the students. Successive calls to the mobile numbers provided to find out the same were not answered. Media reports said over 12000 aspirants from J-K have qualified the NEET 2017 exam.
The gaffe came to light when an immensely popular Kashmiri comedy Facebook page, Jajeer Talkies, shared comparative photos and wrote: “Here’s a picture of Muhammad Yaseen who was killed in Peshawar Attacks. He now is selected for NEET-17 & JEE-17. Hearty congratulations from Kashmir.”
Hilarious comments followed, like: “Joke of the year !!” and “These coaching centres i tell you! poor soul!”
A Google search for “Muhammad Yaseen Peshawar school attack” yields a series of photos of the teenage boy and several collages, featuring that particular mug-shot, are available on Instagram and Pinterest.