Is Delhi in Pakistan? Or does Kolkata float on the Bay of Bengal? Yes, if one goes by an advertisement splashed by the Eastern Railway in major dailies Saturday.
The faux pas occurred in the advertisement in the newspapers publicising the scheduled flagging off of a luxury tourist train Maharajas' Express by Railway Minister Mamata Banerjee Saturday night.
The route of the train was shown by tracing a blurred outline of a map of India within a small box in the advertisment. The outline gave the wrong locations of the national capital and the eastern metropolis.
The Eastern Railway regretted the error but put the blame on the Kolkata-based advertising agency.
"The advertising agency which designed and released the advertisement..has committed a great mistake, pointing out different cities wrongly in respect of the map of India. In the design approved by the Eastern Railway, there was no such mistake. Eastern Railway had given correct details to advertising agency," a railway statement said.
"The advertising agency has been black-listed and debarred from dealing with any railway work," it said.
However, the owner of the advertising agency claimed that the Eastern Railway had been told in advance that it was not possible to show the route while making the map to scale.