A Chinese woman looks gloomily out of her window at a family’s casual banter in a Pakistani neighbourhood in Lahore. The expat clearly misses home, and is struggling to fit in. And then the video loses the plot and mashes up shades of religious identity, fostering inter-community ties, gender stereotypes, with references thrown in to the planned China-Pakistan Economic Corridor.

Heavy? And tacky. And problematic. You might be surprised to know that the point of all this is....an advertisement for a biryani spice mix from the popular Pakistani spice company Shan Foods.

The wisdom on offer is that to fit in with the local people, the Chinese woman must strive to make the perfect biryani (helped along by the spice mix, of course), cover her head with a scarf, and, with these efforts, bond and win over the women of the family she looked so longingly at.

The ad has met with mixed reactions online.

And the downright hilarious ones.