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?”

His Excellency Saluted by Red Army

Groucho Marx once resigned from a club with the explanation that “I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept people like me as a member”.

This famous quip partly explains why I myself do not care to join any club. This bothers and annoys some of my Sydneysider Nepalese friends, who conclude that, since I do not show up in the movable feast of their club barbeques and song-and-dance fests, I must lie low all the time in my dimly-lit ‘cave’ like a mythical slumbering monster. I call this non sequitur “social solipsism”.

To be sure, I do not remember turning down an invitation for private functions. I recently had the pleasure of attending one such function at a friend’s place. I joined a throng of people in the drawing room, and sat down on the floor to watch Australian Open Tennis on Channel 7.

An elderly visitor from Nepal whom I did not know was holding court, surrounded by some well-known stalwarts of the local Nepalese community scene, some of them sitting on the floor just like myself but with their backs to the TV in deference to the elderly visitor.

Even though I was focusing on tennis, I could not help listening to snatches of their conversation, which was, in reality, more like a monologue delivered by the elderly visitor as he regaled his audience by recounting how he had been saluted by Red Army guards and addressed as "Your Excellency" by Foreign Ministry mandarins during a visit to China.

“A Nepalese tour operator with a talent for self-promotion. Elementary, my dear Watson,” I ratiocinated subconsciously.

Inevitably, their conversation turned to the social and economic problems in Nepal and the demands for self-determination by various ethnic groups. Here, the visitor and his listeners politely agreed to disagree, which was not surprising given that the visitor, unlike his audience, belonged to the ruling caste in Nepal.

Finally, the discussion converged on a root cause analysis of the problems besetting the beautiful Himalayan republic. At last, all parties could reach some sort of consensus. Yes, all agreed, it was not the domination of the ruling caste or the ‘machinations’ of New Delhi, Beijing or Washington that was holding back Nepal’s destiny but a lack of developed institutions.

One local community stalwart clinched the argument by holding up the example of North Korea, pointing out the obvious that the peaceful transfer of power in that glorious nation in the aftermath of Dear Leader Kim Jong-il’s sudden death demonstrated its institutional maturity.

Soon thereafter, the elderly visitor left amidst a flourish of parting ‘Namastes’, and his erstwhile interlocutors started to swap notes and conduct a postmortem of their robust intellectual joust with the visitor. They remonstrated among themselves that the elderly visitor, who seemed to command a lot of respect even in abstentia, had not offered any ‘guidance’ on the question of the ethnic issues.

Curiosity got the better of me and I inquired about the departed visitor. It transpired that he was the Attorney General in a former Nepali Congress government.

Such an August Personage publicly boasting about being saluted by Red Army guards as if it was the highpoint of his public career … and his ethnic audience expecting to be given a prescription for a political panacea by a distinguished buffoon from their masterly class … supposing such a panacea exists …

Perhaps, I should, after all, join a community group to enliven my mirthless existence.

Remembering Girija

Reading through some obits of late Girija Prasad Koirala (1925 - 2010) in the Nepalese media, it seems that in the eye of some commentators, Koirala managed to redeem himself somewhat in the final decade of his life. To begin with, he is praised for standing up to the then Nepalese King Gyanendra, who assumed absolute power in a short-sighted royal coup in 2002 that spelled the end of monarchy in Nepal. Koirala is also credited with persuading parliamentary parties to sign a 12-point agreement with Maoists in Delhi in 2005 that paved the way for the peace process that halted a decade-long armed Maoist insurgency.

The vast majority of the Nepalese people remained hostile to Koirala until the very end, however. Many were unmoved by the news of his death, openly expressing glee and hope that his death would herald a new dawn for Nepal. Others pointed out that even his practical rapproachment with the Maoists was motivated by what many consider to be the most serious blemish on his legacy: nepotism and self-aggrandizement. According to this interpretation, Koirala wanted to resurrect his political fortunes and dynastic ambitions by aligning himself with his erstwhile sworn foes, the Maoists.

Whatever one's opinions about Koirala, he was indisputably one of the most divisive, controversial and dominant political players in the post-1990 Nepal. His early political apprenticeship itself reads like that of a Mafioso enforcer. Living in the shadows of his illustrious older brother BP, who surely was the toughest act to follow in the Nepalese politics, Koirala did the dirty work for his party, the Nepalese Congress. Organizing Biratnanar Jute Mill workers to agitate against the autocratic Rana regime, smuggling weapons across the Nepal-India border to arm anti-Rana forces, hijacking a currency-laden Royal Nepal Airlines plane, printing counterfeit Indian Rupees and eliminating party rivals were all in the day's work for a young Koirala.

In his autobiography, BP, whose literary legacy might yet outshine and outlive his considerable political legacy, famously dismissed his younger brother GP as a party hawaldar or foot soldier, anointing his niece Sailaja as his political heir.

In the wake of the 1990 People's Movement that restored multi-party democracy in Nepal, Koirala emerged as an influential member of the powerful Nepalese Congress triumvirate along with Ganeshman Singh and Krishna Prasad Bhattarai. In the political chaos that followed, Koirala managed to sideline his two key party rivals amidst bitter public feuds, and did his best to undermine a short-lived government of Communist Party of Nepal (United Marxist Leninist). In the end, he surpassed his older brother BP's wildest dreams by becoming Prime Minister for five times on the back of his undoubted skills at mobilizing the party faithful.

As a reporter for The Kathmandu Post, I had occasion to cover many tedious ceremonies and functions in which Koirala cut ribbons and/or starred as the chief guest. One such occasion left an indelible mark on my mind.

The function was held at the Blue Star Hotel. Koirla was not holding any official position at the time - of course, nothing less than the Prime Minister's Office would have suited his ego - even though his party had formed the government. One of the senior ministers in the government, Bal Bahadur Rai, was also invited to the function.

Rai committed the unpardonable sin of arriving at the function after his party overlord Koirala, whose career was far from over despite appearances. As if to prove this point, a sanctimonious Koirala went on to give a very public dressing down to the embarrassed senior minister, scolding him like a mischievous school boy for arriving late at the "people's function". All that Minister Rai, who looked more like a dreamy, self-satisfied Abbot of a Buddhist monastery than a senior Nepali Congress leader and cabinet minister that he was, could do to counter the hypocritical and self-righteous tirade from his boss was to grin sheepishly and fold his hands together in a gesture of feigned humility and remorse.

Muna Madan

Gurkha Nepalese Community (GNC), a Sydney-based Nepalese community organization, is staging Muna Madan as part of its annual Dashain festivities this year. A casual conversation with a dear friend of mine who also happens to be one half of a GNC power couple inspired the following thoughts about the most popular lyrical drama of the youngest Himalayan republic.

• Muna Madan is arguably the greatest work of Nepal's unarguably the greatest poet, Laxmi Prasad Devkota


• A miniature masterpiece, the work partly owes it popular appeal to its use of folk idioms and metres


• The drama centres around the trials and travails of a high-caste migrant worker journeying to Lhasa (Tibet) for work and back


• Apart from the constraints placed by a traditional society on romantic love, the drama also highlights the twin evils of casteism and manpower drain that have impeded Nepal's emergence from the dark shadows of its past


• The most famous line from Muna Madan, spoken by the high-caste protagonist to a "lowly" Bhote who nurses him back to health, is: "Man becomes great not by caste, but by heart"

Nepal in Chess Olympiad

A 5-member Nepalese team including National Champion Surbir Lama is participating in the 38th Chess Olympiad being held in Dresden, Germany from November 13 to 25. This is only the third time that Nepal is taking part in this prestigious event.