CST’s show of solidarity with French gets Dutch twist

The Central Railway’s well-intentioned idea of lighting up the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus with colours of the French flag to show solidarity against the terror attack on Sunday did not quite go as planned. The building, which would have looked French if it had three vertical stripes in blue, white and red looked Dutch because the stripes were horizontal instead of vertical. In an attempt to save face, the Central Railway maintained that it was not trying to light up the monument exactly like the French flag but merely showing solidarity against the terror attacks by representing its colours.

The French national flag has three vertical stripes of blue (left), white (middle) and red (right). The Dutch flag uses the same colours, but has horizontal stripes. The mistake was pointed out by mediapersons and was trending on social media as well. Central Railway’s chief public relations officer (CPRO) Narendra Patil said,

“We are showing solidarity with the French people who died in the terrorist attack. Even when we tweeted the photograph we had said ‘CST lit in French colours’. There is no mention of their flag,” said Mr Patil.

Mr Patil has also added that other monuments like the Space Needle in Seattle and the World Trade Centre too were all lit up in horizontal stripes of the French tricolour. Incidentally, these are vertical buildings that only lit up their steeples. However, there were several monuments like Sydney’s Opera House, the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, London’s National Gallery which were bathed vertically in the colours of the French national flag. “The point is that we were thinking of the people who lost their lives and their loved ones,” Mr Patil said, adding that to get the vertical stripes, they would need to make changes to the software, which would have taken at least a day or two.