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Lately international news agencies have been flood­ed with reports, criticism and concerns about harvesting personal information on digital platforms, Facebook in particu­lar. Its owner, Mark Zuckerberg, one of the richest people on the planet, was recently grilled by American congressmen over the issue. While Zuckerberg agreed that his company had not done enough to secure data, Facebook, he clarified, does not “sell data to advertisers.” I was once told in the US by an ex-officer of National Security Agency (NSA) that every single Facebook post and Twitter feed was recorded at the Library of Congress. I was shocked. If you go to the Library of Congress (LOC), the official library of the US, you can read about Twitter “donat­ing” its digital archive to LOC. A 2010 press release on its website says, “Today the Library holds more than 167 terabytes of web-based information.” However, in 2017, it limited the number of tweets to be archived and did not record all public tweets.

The NSA person had further said that when you enter cer­tain keywords on search engines like Google, you could be under surveillance. When I told him that I was researching Al Qaeda, he said the place where you do your search also matters. In my case, it was mostly the library of my university, which he said would be relatively safer, perhaps because I wouldn’t be looking for Al Qaeda all the time or even if I did, it would be related to my research. Anyway, that made me realize, what you search on Google or share on social media would be monitored, and that could be considered as evidence if there was a criminal case later. Crowdsourcing!

On Google, you can basically find anything and everything. Whether you want to know about appendicitis, Nepal’s armed con­flict, or potty training, you can Google. It has been such a part of life that even my two-year-old son holds my cell phone close to him and says, “Okay Google.” But hey, Google follows you all the time, locating where you went, recording what you bought, what you searched or deleted, keeps information of what apps you use, and it even has an advertisement profile of you. Well, all of these may still be fine if not misused, but who knows?

The times have changed so dra­matically in the last 20 years or so that imagining a life without Facebook or Google is almost impossible, almost everywhere in the world. There’s no question that internet brings people closer and provides a plethora of good information. But it is not without risks. There have been reports in Nepal too of cybercrime and police action. In fact, police sug­gest we do not share status of where we are travelling or what we are doing so that we don’t fall prey to criminal minds. So, next time you post anything on social media or search Google, just be careful. Your searches and posts could be monitored from places unknown. OMG!

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Within hours of the earthquake on April 25, 2015, other countries were flying in emergency relief workers and aid. Many tourists and residents left the country a few days later on these returning relief planes. I myself had the experience of flying in a Royal Australian Air Force cargo plane to Bangkok.

Everyone fully expected the runway to be damaged by a big earthquake, despite the fact it sits on land less susceptible to liquefac­tion than much of Kathmandu. We were extremely lucky in 2015. But what if Malindo or any other airliner was blocking the runway just prior to a major earthquake? As we saw when Turkish Airlines skidded on landing and blocked the runway for several days, Nepal does not have the equipment necessary to move a heavy plane.

Recently I did some research on the Thai Airlines and Pakistan Airlines air crashes that both happened in 1992 as the planes approached TIA. That did not make for good reading. Steps to improve air safety have been taken since. But despite these steps, including a brand new radar system installed as recently as December 2017, the US Bangla Airlines crash of last month has left many bereft and many more horrified and, yes, scared. Accidents do happen. That’s a fact. Whether human or equipment error or just sheer bad luck, we cannot escape that ‘shit happens’.

So we need to be prepared. Yet Nepal is often very unprepared. At the moment the runway is due to be lengthened by 300m so that a local­izer antenna can be installed at the end of it. The reason for the length­ening is that planes should not come within 150m of the antenna and the current runway is not long enough to accommodate that.

Money has been allocated and the contractor has been selected. Yet several months on, the contractor has not started work. The completion deadline of early 2019 will definitely be missed. We can speculate why things like this happen, but we know that it is not just ‘bad luck’. Meantime, we wait for this additional safety feature to be installed—at some point—in the future.

Many lives have been lost through natural disasters, includ­ing the Gorkha Earthquake, and many others have been lost through plane crashes. I express my sympathy to everyone affected by these terrible events. This week I am leaving the rest of this column blank … because I am simply without words.  

Action Adventure
RAMPAGE
CAST:Dwayne Johnson, Naomie Harris, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Malin Akerman
DIRECTION: Brad Peyton

‘Rampage’ is one of those sci-fi action flicks where Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson saves the world from destruction. Here he teams up with his ‘San Andreas’ director, Brad Peyton, to dish out a cinematic mayhem of massive proportion. As a genre piece, the movie is happy to remain in the margins and never comes close to stand apart from the likes of ‘Godzilla’ or ‘King Kong’. Its sole ambition is to let computer-gen­erated imagery (CGI) overtake storytelling. Take it as a guilty plea­sure and you might actually enjoy the well-crafted visual effect spec­tacles, but take it as a serious enter­tainment and you might sit through the movie scratching your head over the film’s unimaginative story and thin characterization. Dwayne Johnson plays Davis Okoye, a former anti-poaching spe­cial force operative, now working at San Diego Wildlife Sanctuary as lead primatologist looking after the reha­bilitation of rescued gorillas. Among the pack, an albino gorilla named George is pals with Davis. We see the two exchange teasing remarks in signs and fist bumping each other. Then through an unfortunate chain of events, George gets exposed to a container that happened to store samples from a doomed experiment at a space lab. Overnight, the expo­sure alters George’s DNA and he grows into a King Kong-sized gorilla with anger issues. Soon he’s wreak­ing havoc in the sanctuary.

George isn’t the only genetically mutated animal. There are others as well—a crocodile and a wolf, for instance. The military wants to shoot them down and the tech com­pany behind the failed experiment wants to capture the animals to recover genetic samples.

In the wake of all this, Davis wants to save his friend George before he goes on a rampage and destroys everything in his way. In his quest, Davis is aided by a genetic scientist (Naomie Harris) and a federal agent (Jeffrey Dean Morgan).

Though flawed, the movie is eas­ily watchable because it doesn’t take itself seriously. The charac­ters are deliberately simpleminded and stripped off any depth. For instance, we never get an inkling of Davis’ social life and he remains a macho from the beginning to the end, without changing much. The writing is so expositional that characters will overstate the obvi­ous. As I pointed out earlier, director Peyton is here to deliver carnage and explosion, not a story that examines the human folly to mess with nature. For him, character development is a distraction and he makes no effort at highbrow art; he’s here to churn mass popular cinematic senti­ments with ‘The Rock’ in it, and he is moderately successful.

Speaking of actors, Dwayne John­son is his usual gung-ho self. His character graph is trite, and the story doesn’t ask for much save for his beefy stature and straight-face. Naomie Harris is given an emotional backstory with a tragedy involving her brother. But the film treats these emotional beats as speed bumps and instead cuts to the well-de­signed action sequences. Jeffrey Dean Morgan of ‘The Walking Dead’ makes his presence felt as the wise­cracking federal agent, who turns blind eye to Davis’ questionable ways to rescue George just because Davis saved his life.

You don’t go to a movie starring ‘The Rock’ expecting it to be an eye-opening cerebral drama. And ‘Rampage’ doesn’t sweat hard to be that kind of film. It is a pure campy mixed-bag of action and carnage with a mechanical plot. One-time viewing only.

Romance
LILY BILY
CAST:
Jassita Gurung, Pradeep Khadka, Priyanka Karki, Anup Bikram Shahi
DIRECTION:
Milan Chams

When ‘Lily Bily’ reached its interval mark, I was the first one to barge out of the hall, in desperate need of fresh air. Not once in my movie-going life had I so strongly wanted the multiplex’s food counter to sell aspirins. I couldn’t walk out right away because I had to review the whole movie, not just the first half. I envied the five chatty teenagers who were seated next to me at the beginning of the movie because they had no such obligation. They quietly disappeared after the inter­val to maybe spend the rest of the day on something more exciting, given it was the Nepali New Year. As for me, I downed a strong cup of coffee to build my immunity for the second half.

With a title like Lily Bily, I think the makers aspired for a kind of romance between two star-crossed lovers, a la Romeo Juliet, Muna Madan or Laila Majnu. But the movie ends up as the romance between two utterly unlik­able and dimwitted protagonists: Shruti aka Lily (Jassita Gurung) and Avash aka Bily (Pradeep Khadka); a better title for the movie would have been Silly Silly.

The entire movie is a long flash­back that Shruti has inside the Jacobite steam train while travel­ing through the Scottish highlands. In this long flashback, there are multiple mini-flashbacks and voice-over monologues that make the movie an exercise in uninspired writing and boring filmmaking. Everyone involved in this movie, from its director Milan Chams to its leads, and to the person who com­posed the film’s background score, seemed clueless.

It starts off as a road trip movie: two people meeting after a long time. It shifts gear when the girl’s angry ex-boyfriend (Anup Bikram Shahi) makes an appear­ance and throws some kicks and punches at the hero. After that the ex-boyfriend vanishes. The story gets muddled when Shruti’s parents come into the picture along with her would-be fiancé (Sabin Shrestha) and whisk her away from Avash. Shruti then goes against the wishes of her family and pursues Avash, only to find that he has another woman in his life.

The plot is really disposable there­after and stops making sense, with subplots involving euthanasia and what not. Milan Chams, from what I’ve read, is a Nepali filmmaker with a strong footing among the NRNs in the UK. The only possible reason for him to make something like Lily Bily was to use his access to shoot a Nepali movie at a foreign location. So he’s attentive only in making good use of his camera while filming the song sequences.

A third of the movie has people either walking away from each other or running towards each other. And Chams feasts on these moments by shooting them in ultra-slow motion.

Pradeep Khadka, fresh out of Prem Geet, is bereft of any charisma. He’s paired with newcomer Jassita Gurung. Both act cutesy and funny but they are in fact childish puppy lovers, who indulge in banal conversation and fail to give us one memorable dialogue. They play protagonists in an Idiot Plot (a term coined by late film critic Roger Ebert), where the big misunderstanding could have been easily resolved if one character stepped up and spoke with clarity.

I went to the theater expecting Lily Bily to be a feel-good romance. I came out watching a feature length tourism video on Scotland.