Eating Rice and Mutton Curry from Brass Plates While Thinking About Home

“Come, eat rice and mutton curry from brass plates – just like back home!” read an advertisement for a Nepalese restaurant here in Sydney, playing on the homesickness and ingrained culinary habits of local Nepalese residents.

I habitually pick up free Nepalese newsletters from various Indo-Bengali-Nepalese grocery stores that dot Sydney’s “ethnic enclaves” to read not so much the news and articles but the advertisements for various products and services.

These advertisements paint an accurate picture of the aspirations, hopes, triumphs, heartaches, struggles and yearnings of the Nepalese people here and elsewhere in Australia.

In the world of print media, there used to be two competing views about the place of the "fourth estate" in the body politic (Admittedly, free community newsletters may not be able to claim membership of the fourth estate as their voice is hardy audible in the cacophony of the national discourse still dominated by a few media corporations).

One of these views proclaimed newspapers to be the raw material of history, or even history itself in the making, while cynics disparaged them as little more than vehicles for selling advertisements and for peddling and perpetuating ignorance, falsehood and bigotry.

The undercurrents of these dichotomous views of the print media can be detected even in humble community newsletters. They definitely convey a sense of history in the making (albeit a peripheral one) and they peddle products and services as well as news, gossips and opinions. They editorialize as if they have the power to shape opinion and guide the hand of history - if not here, then at least back home.

A recent newsletter that I grabbed from a local Nepalese grocery store had an advertisement for a “Roaming pest control”, reflecting growing home ownership in the Nepalese community.

Another advertisement for a Nepalese consultancy promised an “entire gamut of IT and Telecommunications services to your organization”. A bulleted list spelled out what an “entire gamut” meant: e-commerce solution, IT application for enterprises, project management, data migration services, quality assurance and testing, and so on.

Interestingly, the same consultancy also offered “cheapest international flight tickets, low domestic flight tickets in Nepal and India”, and, best of all, “... a lifetime journey to the magistical (sic) Himalayan adobe (sic)”, including Bhutan.

Advertisements like this one signify the presence of a viable local Nepalese market, and the pleasing fact that the diaspora is acquiring wealth and entrepreneurial flair.

In keeping with the zeitgeist, another colour advertisement posted by a “business consultant” asked: “Looking for an Exciting Business Opportunity?”, offering to “make it easier to find you a perfect business with finance”. The business consultant also promised to find finance for car loans, even for students, which told me that the fortunes of Nepalese students have improved dramatically since my own days as an impecunious overseas student.

However, the vast majority of the advertisements are still for overseas student services that range from finding colleges, changing courses and education providers to advice for permanent residency, which still remains the ultimate goal of most Nepalese students.

Perhaps inevitably, even the afore-mentioned IT consultancy-cum-travel agency offered services for international students, revealing the full extent of its “entire gamut”. In the full-page colour advertisement, it posed what it hoped to be a rhetorical question: “Finding it hard to select right Collages (sic) / Universities?”