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‘There is no such thing as a free lunch’. It’s a saying that means you do not get any­thing for free in this world. But recently I, my mother, and some of her friends, got a free dinner.After watching a wonderful perfor­mance by Andre Rieu in Maastricht, The Netherlands, broadcast live into a local cinema in Scotland, we had booked a table at a nearby, middle of the road but well respected, restau­rant called The Bothy (Scottish name for a small hut used for refuge in a storm on a mountain). At the end we wanted to pay our bills separately. Normally in Kathmandu the waiter would then get a calculator out and start asking what we each had, tick­ing it off the bill as he went.

But not so in this paperless restau­rant! Aside from the very off-hand manager who said he was ‘too busy’ to do this (and who really got our heckles up), it seemed impos­sible to simply tick items off the bill without involving the com­puterised till. A special code from employee X was required. Then it seemed the card reader required another authorization code from employee Y. By this time 15 min­utes had passed and we were no closer to paying the bill. Finally, the card reader simply refused to work. We could almost see the smoke coming out of the machine as it scratched its electronic head!

At this point the owner, who had somehow become involved, said the computerized system was not built to cope with changes once the orig­inal information was fed in. In exas­peration she gave herself authority to write off our meal. A free dinner! We were quite relieved the matter was now resolved as we had things to do that evening. But we were also concerned that the restaurant lost out on quite a bit of money because the paperless system was inflexible.

This incident brought to mind a picture of Nepali politicians sitting in a meeting with their brand new Macbook Pro laptops. Presumably because the Nepal Government is set to go paperless. There are a lot of things that can be said here such as: are all politicians computer lit­erate (after using a laptop for about 15 years my skills are still pretty near zero), can they type in Nepali (which I believe is a skill in itself), or are they working in English (a second language in which few will be fluent)? But mainly my thoughts go out to those who are trying to move their case (landpapers/mar­riages/ passports/ citizenships/birth registration, etc) around the many government departments.

Do we all need to have access to computers now? What about those who either cannot afford a com­puter, lack the skills, or live in an area which does not have access to such things or even access to inter­net or electricity? What happens when remote area (ex VDC office—and what is a local government office called these days anyway?) meets central government?

Currently if you want to find a file in a government office that you filed some time back, there is a helpful peon who knows exactly what room and what pile of folders your file is in. What happens when this is on some equivalent of the Cloud? Taxes have been submitted on-line for quite some time now. But of course, in the end, taxpayers end up in the tax office in person any way. How are they going to avoid similar sce­narios in every department?

Remember the breathalysers that were handed out to the police some time back? What happened to them? (And don’t even think about the health risks involved in breathing into the officer’s face.) Will those lovely Macbook Pros go the same way as the breathalysers?

Yes, going paperless could well result in a lot of free dinners!

My mom had been hospital­ized and the doctors said she needed to insert a fistula in case dialysis was urgently needed. I went to the pharmacist with the pre­scription for the fistula set. And the set included, among other things, four pairs of surgical gloves. Gloves? I couldn’t believe it! Never had it occurred to me that gloves, which doctors use all the time, needed to be sponsored by the patients. I asked the pharmacist if it was really required and he said the set con­tained all those items. I got angry and told the nurse in attendance to pass my message to the doctors that I was ready to donate masks and caps too. Aren’t gloves primary items needed for medical persons (although I hardly see nurses wearing them) when attending any patient?

Talking about ‘taking care of the patients’—sometimes I wonder if we go to hospital to be treated or to be infected. I had gone for my prenatal checkup in one famous hospital in Kathmandu. The toilets around the gynecological depart­ment were awful. First, the com­mode was not clean; the seats were all dirty. I looked for toilet papers to wipe the seat. There was none. And then I realized there was no trash can either. Even government schools in Nepal, however poor they may be, keep trash cans in girls’ toilets. I wondered how women could visit such hospitals during their periods. I got out of the toilet to wash my hands, and there was no soap either.

Once, I had gone to see a gyne­cologist at her private clinic in Kath­mandu. I was advised to get a urine test. When I entered the toilet, there was hardly a spot where I could plant my feet without letting them get extra wet. It was a clinic run by a woman who has children. She could be sensitive to other women’s needs. But nope, she did not care about the cramped waiting area or about the money that she would happily keep in her purse, without giving a receipt. Tax evasion you know! But who lets this apathy go unchecked?

I was once hospitalized in the US. After spending three nights, I was discharged. A couple of days later, I got a phone call from the hospital. It was a phone survey on how the hospital took care of me. I was asked questions like: Did the nurse sanitize their hands before attending to you? Did they put on fresh gloves? Did you like the food you were given? Did they change bed sheets?

Yes, it might be too much for us in Nepal to expect these services avail­able in developed countries. But on second thought, why not? Following a good global practice, and one that does not cost much, shouldn’t be a big deal.

Private hospitals in Nepal are expensive and there is no effec­tive insurance system in place. As a result the majority of the costs need to be borne by the patients themselves. Yes, there have been a few progressive chang­es (made by the government) such as provision of free dialysis but charging patients for basic hospital supplies like gloves—which are in fact vital for the attendants’ health too—is simply immoral!

Action/Adventure

THE MEG

CAST: Jason Statham, Rainn Wilson, Li Bingbing, Winston Chao

DIRECTION: Jon Turteltaub

1 and half stars

When I first saw the trailer of ‘The Meg’ I thought it was a reboot of ‘Jaws’, the popular monster shark-film series. However, it’s a Chinese-American coproduction that has got noth­ing to do with the series and is instead based on a novel of Ameri­can writer Steve Alten. Action star Jason Statham is Jonas Taylor, a deep-sea rescue diver, who has to fight a predatory shark of massive and mythical proportions. If you’re an action film buff, the mere mention of Jason Statham versus a shark will make you anticipate a scene where Statham is punching the animal with his bare hands. So seeing Statham’s heroics mostly restricted to just pushing buttons and staring through screens make us won­der why the star’s tough-as-nails demeanor has been underused in a monster movie that could’ve done with a lot more of the regular Statham-ness.

For once, ‘The Meg’ isn’t a dramatically deep and existential­ist underwater exploration movie where the lead actor gets a chance to show his inner Daniel Day-Lewis. It is a full-blown potboiler, packed in with so many layers of storyline that it stretches into a slack and boring affair without inspiring any moments of suspense or high tension.

The story begins somewhere off-coast in China at a high-tech deep sea research center run by a team of scientists looking for life beyond the bottom surface of earth’s deep­est point, Mariana Trench. Winston Chao plays Dr Zhang, the leader of the research team, and Rainn Wilson plays Morris, the Ameri­can billionaire who has funded the operation. When the film opens, Morris is visiting the place for the first time. As Dr Zhang and his daughter Suyin (Li Bingbing) give him the grand tour of the place, a three-crew submarine explor­ing the bottom Mariana Trench encounters a massive deep sea creature and loses contact.

They waste no time in locat­ing the washed out deep sea res­cue diver Jonas Taylor (Statham) and asking for his help to get the submarine team out of the bot­tom of the ocean. Meanwhile the scientists at the research center assess whether or not they have angered a monster which appears to be a megalodon, the prehistoric 60-foot shark believed to be extinct a long time ago.

Director Jon Turteltaub does not offer anything new to the genre. The film’s overall aim appears to be a children-friendly family enter­tainer so many sequences don’t so much shock and awe but only try to please the crowd.

The CGI is average too. There aren’t any exciting moments that leap at you or catch you off-guard. For the majority of the film you just sink in your seats and watch the mechan­ical storytelling unfold. Even when the titular monster Meg makes an on screen appear­ance, it fails to stir mayhem and dread. The monster shark deserved a better development. Revealing its monstrosity through just expository dialogues does nothing to make the creature scar­ier when the visuals don’t comple­ment the verbal build up.

Besides Statham’s scowls and frowns that make up his rusty per­formance, the rest of the film’s international cast comes across as if they signed up to the project for the paycheck not because they found their characters interesting. Li Bingbing’s Suyin is so incon­sistently written that we see her quickly switch from someone who is skeptical of Statham’s Jonas for his rash methods to someone who is swept off her feet as soon as she sees Jonas’ ripped body. There are many deliberate moments to romantically involve Jonas and Suyin but each of these moments feels forced and out of sync with the overall movie.

‘The Meg’ is a big budget movie with low energy and no refreshing ideas to make it stand out. This is the kind of film which would’ve worked better with a focused story and edgier thrills. In its current shape, it doesn’t have the teeth to grab the audience till the end!

Starting August 8 General Purna Chandra Thapa takes command of the Nepal Army. The appointment is not as sexy as it appears, as the institution is marred by problems. But let’s hope that Thapa will, at the end of the day, leave his mark as one of the ablest CoAS.Unlike how it projects itself, the army doesn’t have modern weap­ons, or enough funding to support almost 100,000 personnel. It’s going to be this way for long time, so let’s not even ask the new chief to lobby with the government for new weapons and more fund­ing. Instead let’s ask him to do things that are within his power to improve public perception of the army, create happy officers and arm it with good information, the most important aspect of security these days.

The military does not enjoy as positive public image as it used to until a decade ago. Rampant cor­ruption, nepotism and favoritism have resulted in bad press for the institution. Further, by involving itself in infrastructure projects, like the Kathmandu-Tarai fast track, our military is morphing into a construction company and courting controversy.

Therefore, the first order of business for Thapa should be to rid the institution of corruption and unnecessary controversy by taking its hands off the fast track project and other similar infra­structure endeavors. We want our army to defend our borders and protect our VIPs and wildlife; we don’t want to see it evolve into a business house by hand­ing out subcontracts. The army can instead provide security and blasting expertise to civilian con­tractors. That way it will be able to focus on its primary duties and avoid controversy.

The second issue concerns pro­motions, especially the promo­tion from the rank of major to lieutenant colonel. The fast track promotion system leaves lots of room to maneuver in order to promote one’s favorites or the ones who are well-connected. The fact that some officers had to petition the defense ministry against some promotions recently does not augur well for the image of the military.

To add to the misery of mid-level officers, the staff col­lege entrance test, the iron-gate to further promotions, seems to favor the elites and the well-con­nected. The fact that it is conduct­ed in English makes it tough for officers from rural areas or those who attended public schools to compete against the ones who attended elite schools in Kath­mandu. The textbook for mili­tary history issued by the Nepal Army’s Staff and Command Col­lege is unreadable, to say the least. It is basically a collection of papers by Nepali and foreign officers without enough editing for language uniformity or clarity. The paper on current affairs does not even have any guidelines: you are expected to know everything about everything, ranging from environment issues to politics to military technologies to sports. All in all, the staff college entrance does not test one’s creativity and problem-solving, but only English and memorization skills.

Moreover, although it has more officers taking it, the army hasn’t increased the number of seats proportionately. Earlier, the ratio between test takers and seats was around 1:3; these days it is around 1:6. Nepal Army thus loses some of the brightest officers due to the unscientific way it conducts its staff college entrance test.

When he addresses these two pressing issues, the new COAS needs to focus on developing the army’s intelligence capability, just like the former chief Guarab Shumsher Rana had envisioned and tried to accomplish during his tenure. One way to do this, as the military doctrine states, is to tie up with civilians and think tanks to produce reports and papers on various aspects of the society and international events. Today’s military needs information and it should utilize expertise of civilian experts for analysis of events, both domestic and foreign, as is the practice in many countries.

Revamping the army’s image and initiating internal reforms, though urgent, won’t be easy. General Thapa will face oppo­sitions from in and outside the military. Let’s hope that General Thapa, who has served in many difficult missions in Nepal and abroad, will initiate the process to transform our military from an exclusively fighting force to a fighting and “thinking” force.

All the best, General Thapa.