I am Chinese Malaysian. I do not consider myself particularly religious or spiritual but am nominally Christian by faith.

Having read Jom-Boikot's Boycott disrespectful malls, I feel my comments might be of some interest to your discerning readers.

I have long been appalled by the loud sell, hard sell and rude sell techniques of our Malaysian retailers, most of whom have only one objective in mind which is to sell, sell, sell.

My ears are deafened by the loud blaring music and I find some of the tacky festive decorations to be acutely embarrassing.

I would hate to think that anyone, especially non-Christians, might mistake this crass and ugly commercialism for religion of any sort.

I am not at all offended by loud religious music or bright religious decorations during non-Christian festivals but I am very conscious, perhaps overly so about Christian festivals because I feel that in whatever small fashion, it sort of represents my belief to the world.

The relative scale and prominence of Christian or non-Christian celebrations in Malaysia is not an issue for me.

In Malaysia, I would like to think that everyone, Christians and non-Christians alike, understand that all religious festivities are there simply to be enjoyed.

I do understand if some non-Christians might feel left out by the massive shopping promotions and accompanying advertising campaigns in the weeks beforeChristmas and New Year.

I do not think God would approve of having anyone feel left out, especially if they were poor.

This is why ostentatious consumption and crass commercialism turns me off.

I do think however that there is a big difference between crass cultural ignorance or ugly commercialism on the one hand, and deliberate racial insult or ethnic disrespect on the other.

Our opportunistic hard-sell shopping mall retailers may be guilty of the former, but certainly not the latter.

Deliberately insisting on interpreting everything from a rigidly ethnic viewpoint will necessarily distort our perceptions of reality.

Although such a strategy has served our increasingly wealthy and privileged professional politicians and their cronies well, it will be at the continued expense of the common man, and ordinary tax-paying citizen.

A refusal to view politics in terms other than ethnic makes possible a successful electoral strategy of divide and rule by our elected politicians and cronies at the expense of race relations.

Ethnicity in a multi-racial country like Malaysia has the power to marginalise all other considerations including democracy, governance, environment, human rights, judicial independence, mass media manipulation, money politics, corruption, cronyism, nepotism, and lack of transparency or accountability.

Give me a hard-sell Malaysian shopping mall retailer, and I will show you someone who works very hard trying to earn a decent living in these difficult times.

After ethnicising everything else, are we going to racialise Malaysian festive shopping mall decorations too?