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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.

KathmanduArticle 17 of the new consti­tution grants the citizens of Nepal “freedom of opinion and expression”. But there is a cave­at. “Reasonable restrictions”, says the charter, may be imposed “on any act which may undermine the nationality, sovereignty, indepen­dence and indivisibility of Nepal, or federal units, or jeopardizes the harmonious relations subsisting among the people of various caste, ethnicity, religion, or communities.”The same Article provisions fur­ther restrictions on acts deemed to “incite racial discrimination, or untouchability, or disrespects labor, or any act of defamation, or con­tempt of court, or an incitement of offence, or is contrary to decent public behavior or morality”.

With so many conditions on free expression and dissent, can we say there is freedom of expres­sion in Nepal?

Couldn’t the state for instance easily misuse the statute to sup­press dissent and stifle free press? After all, this is a country that not long ago deported a foreign nation­al for expressing views that were deemed against ‘national interest’. More recently, some allege that the all-powerful government of KP Sharma Oli is trying to impose severe restrictions on I/NGOs on the pre­text of ‘systematizing’ them. Former prime minister and Nepali Congress President Sher Bahadur Deuba calls it ‘creeping authoritarianism’. More­over, as has recently been the case in India, rumors continue to swirl in Nepal about new laws to ‘regulate’ online news.

In theory, yes. In practice, depends

“Principally, free speech should not be restricted under any condition,” says Bipin Adhikari, an expert on constitutional law. “But it is much easier to advocate for absolute freedom of speech in developed countries. Perhaps it is unrealistic to apply the same stan­dards to developing countries where freedom of expression is but one of the many citizen rights that need state protection.”

In his view, our constitutional provisions are in keeping with the country’s needs and level of devel­opment. More importantly, says Adhikari, the culture of listening to each other and accepting diversity is growing in Nepal.

But writer CK Lal, a trenchant critic of the new constitution—and of what he labels the ‘Per­manent Establishment of Nepal’ (PEON), comprised of the tra­ditionally dominant Khas-Arya ethnic group—sees a troubling trend gaining ground. “Earlier, during the Panchayat rule, there used to be window dressing that pur­portedly depicted the state’s inclusion­ary character. But with ethno-na­tionalism enshrined as the central character of the new constitution, even the need for such window dressing has been dispensed with.”

Lal does not believe dissent is easily tolerated in Nepal because “a society built on a single religion is an inherently dogmatic society. And the more assertive the religion becomes, the more dogmatic the society gets.”

If that is the case, isn’t life difficult for dissidents like him?

“Yes, it is. You become an outcast just because you refuse to jump into the gravy train,” Lal replies.

Permanent critics?

What about the accusation that critics and dissenters like him are stuck in a narrow well and simply cannot see beyond it? And why do they always, as some put it, have to talk negative? “How do you dif­ferentiate between negative and positive views?” asks Yug Pathak, another harsh critic of the current ruling establishment comprised of the ‘old Hindu elite’. “In a free society, there has to be healthy debate on all important issues. Only robust debates produce creative sparks of knowledge.”

Pathak blames Nepal’s “flawed history” for what he sees as the prevalent intolerance. “Things started going awry when the Gorkhalis start­ed their campaign of state expansion and internal col­onization. They controlled the whole narrative. Only at the start of the 20th century did ideas from outside the country start trickling in.”

But even in the 20th century the public space was captured by the ruling elite, Pathak says, largely because they contin­ued to control the means of pro­duction. “The kind of Hindu fundamentalism we see in India these days is absent in Nepal. But whenev­er someone says anything against the dominant narrative, that person is dismissed as a nega­tive influence on the society.”

Fine lines

Siddharth Varadarajan, former editor of The Hindu and the found­ing editor of thewire.in, a vital online platform in India for anti-establish­ment and dissenting views, thinks that one should make a distinction between dissent and freedom of expression. “More than dissent, it’s freedom of expression that’s import­ant,” he told APEX.

“The freedom to express oneself in ways that others may not agree with is essential to a democracy and to a free society. Journalists and writers must be free to write, publish and broadcast. Artists must be free to paint. Directors must have the freedom to make the movies they want. And dissidents must have the freedom to dissent.”

Varadarajan points out that while dissent is legal under the Indian constitution, “the individual’s free­dom of expression is often under assault in India.”

Rubeena Mahato, an outspoken Nepali writer and newspaper col­umnist, also qualifies dissent. “A party intellectual who has benefit­ted from being close to power cen­tres his entire life suddenly becomes a ‘dissenting voice’ simply because he opposes the new government. Hateful, racist and inflammatory speech is given space in the main­stream media in the name of repre­senting ‘dissenting voices’.”

“But when it comes to real dis­sent, one that challenges established wisdom, one that is not just about being disruptive to the authority, but comes with a vision about the future, from a place of moral high ground and often at personal costs and sacrifice to those holding it, we are not so tolerant,” Mahato says.

Adhikari, the constitutional expert, cites the fact that even the remotest communities in the coun­try are ruled by elected bodies these days, with growing representation of women and other traditionally marginalized groups, as an example of how the Nepali state has become more inclusive and tolerant. But Lal, the commentator, sees further entrenchment of the traditional Hin­du ethnic hierarchy with the prom­ulgation of the new constitution, which in his view stifles dissent.

‘Corrected’ women

What about Nepali women Adhikari alludes to? Are they free to speak their mind in ‘New Nepal’? Not so, argues Mahato.

“When a woman speaks, peo­ple still feel the need to ‘correct’ her. So engaging in equal terms in public forums or having a produc­tive debate is close to impossible,” she says. “And if you are a woman with contrarian views, you are likely to be punished for your opinions even more.”

“No wonder so many women just choose to stay silent,” Mahato adds, “even on issues they feel strongly about.”

Such strong, and often polarizing, views suggest that dissent and free speech are still matters of intense debate in Nepal. We can only hope that as our democracy matures, so will our public debates.