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.

Bobbin Head: Sydney's Best Kept Secret

Just half an hour's drive from Sydney CBD, Bobbin Head, located within Ku-ring-gai Chase Nationa Park near North Turramurra, is one of Sydney's best kept secrets. The scenic area boasts a rich biodiversity in a sandstone landscape dotted with pockets of rainforests, grassy woodlands and dry eucalyptus forests.

Facilities include coin-operated gas barbecues, a children's playground, fishing spots, walking trails, a cafe, a marina and a historic inn. It overlooks the placid waters of the Cowan Creek.

A mangrove boardwalk after barbecue lunch caps a fine outing for many. The more adventurous can walk up to Wahroonga or Mt Ku-ring-gai train station, which are 5 to 7 kilometres away.

I took some snaps of the area yesterday, and they are posted here for your viewing.

[caption id="attachment_23" align="alignnone" width="300" caption="Marina on the Cowan River"][/caption]

[caption id="attachment_24" align="alignnone" width="300" caption="The Cowan River"][/caption]

[caption id="attachment_26" align="alignnone" width="300" caption="Another view of the Cowan River"][/caption]