Nilay Bang

Here to talk to myself in public and take notes while at it. Investment Banking. IIMA. IIT KGP. CFA.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Lloyd's of London had a $200 million problem floating 210 miles above Earth. So they called NASA and said: go get our satellites back.

NASA charged them $5.5 million. For that price, they got two astronauts in nitrogen jetpacks, flying untethered at 17,500 mph, manually stopping spinning satellites by jamming a spike into their rocket nozzles, then having a third astronaut swing them into the shuttle cargo bay with a robotic arm.

The first retrieval went wrong. The grapple fixture didn't work. Joe Allen had to hold a 9,600-pound satellite over his head by its antenna for an entire 90-minute orbit while Gardner bolted an adapter to the bottom. His wife radioed from Houston: "Make sure there are no pigeons on your shoulders."

They did the second satellite two days later. Ran an hour ahead of schedule.

When Discovery landed at Kennedy Space Center, a Customs official (arranged by NASA pranksters) confronted the crew about duties owed on $200 million in imported satellite equipment. Lloyd's awarded them silver medals, flew them to London on the Concorde, and arranged tea with Prince Charles.

Gardner held up a "For Sale" sign next to the satellites. The jetpack he used was permanently retired. No human has flown untethered in space since.

$5.5 million for a $200 million repo. The best ROI in insurance history came from two guys in jetpacks.

[CA Vivek Khatri @CaVivekkhatri]

🚨Last night, India switched on a reactor.

Here are 9 numbers nobody is talking about:

→ 72 years: Time since Homi Bhabha conceived this plan
→ 22 years: Time to actually build it
→ ₹7,700 crore: Final cost (started at ₹3,492 crore)
→ 500 MW: Power it will generate
→ 2nd: India's global rank only Russia had this before
→ 25%: India's share of world's thorium reserves
→ 400 years: How long those reserves can power India
→ 200+: Indian companies that built it. Zero foreign designs.
→ 3: Countries that tried and quit - USA, Germany, UK

🧵 A thread that will blow your mind:

[Aditya Devulapally @adityakacinema]

#Dhurandhar: The film of the year…you should fucking rush to catch in theatres, here’s why!

1. Most critics are pissed, all the more reason
Let's address the saffron elephant in the room: #Dhurandhar is a pro-government film, yes.

The critics calling #Dhurandhar propaganda aren't wrong. They're just boring. Here's what they're missing while polishing their moral credentials on their stories…this is the most pure Bollywood-esque non-South exciting cinema they made in years (I have my issues with Animal), and pretending it isn't won't make it go away

Most woke critics and the left are mad because they no longer have exclusive access to elite filmmaking and right wing is going from jingoistic dumb cinema to sophisticated slick cinema. This pisses them off more than anything.

The film genuflects before Modi-era policies with the devotion of an erudite, smart-speaking and artsy party spokesperson (they also do exist clearly). Critics are tearing it apart for exactly this reason.

2. The film has crazily good craft
This is Aditya Dhar operating at full tilt, bits of Sandeep Reddy Vanga's visceral brutality, bits of Pushpa's underworld building, a little bit Tom Cruise nationalist porn and somehow, somehow, the alchemy works sexily. The film is a genre-blending fever dream…spy thriller bleeds into gangster saga bleeds into underdog resurrection story, all held together by action choreography so haptic you can taste the gunpowder, that blood, that bodies being cut…you feel everything. You taste and smell the dirty air of Pakistan (even though it’s shot in some other place…Kudos for this excellent craft)

That confidence. That shameless, chest-out, I’ll-do-what-I-want confidence. Nothing in Bollywood has dared to be this fun and violent in years. Everyone else is busy being tasteful. Respectable. Woke-friendly. #Dhurandhar couldn’t give a fuck!

The film's genius lies in its subversive world-building architecture. You expect Ranveer Singh's Hamza to infiltrate Pakistan's terror networks and dismantle them with clinical precision…standard secret agent playbook. Instead, Dhar gives you something far more morally queasy…Hamza indirectly enables 26/11. That guilt doesn't just haunt him, it rewires the entire film's DNA.

Suddenly, this isn't a victory lap. It's a penance story

And instead of bombing army installations or engaging in geopolitical chess, Hamza gets trapped in Pakistan's gangland, a grotesque, ugly underworld where fingers are severed like cigarettes and heads explode into visceral matter. The film takes exquisite, almost perverse patience in building this ecosystem…the mafia hierarchies, the territorial codes, the cool character names, the way violence is casually brutal. Dhar understands that great gangster films aren't about the killing…they're about the architecture that makes killing inevitable.

Watch how the film braids patriotism with criminality in vérité style docu-fiction, how Hamza's mission becomes indistinguishable from survival, how nationalism curdles into something far stranger and more unsettling than flag-waving heroics. This felt to me like Goodfellas reimagined as covert ops cinema

3. Of course, #AkshayeKhanna, the man finally gets recognition
Akshaye Khanna appears.
That’s it man, that’s cinema!
Thin. Coiled. Eyes like a lit match.
One of those presences that makes the whole theatre go silent without meaning to. No theatrics. No punchlines. Just the calm of a man who has killed often enough to have opinions on technique. He doesn’t perform villainy. He breathes it. When his anthem drops, the seat under you vibrates. It’s ridiculous. It’s over the top. It’s perfect.

4. Ranveer too seems to found his charm again
Ranveer Singh is a peculiar beast…an actor who oscillates wildly between brilliance and buffoonery depending entirely on the director. Give him a visionary, and he locks in. Give him a hack, and he becomes unbearable. Here, under Dhar's control, Ranveer is operating in that rare frequency where movie-star charisma marries actual craft.

Hamza is layered in ways Bollywood rarely allows its heroes to be…guilty, calculating, desperate, magnetic, greedy. Every frame, Ranveer makes you root not because Hamza is righteous, but because he's trying. That's harder to pull off than it sounds. Ranveer reminded so much of his powerhouse performance in Gully Boy.

5. That sexy original music by Shashwat Sachdev
Dhar's use of music is also so damn original and fetishistic. Pulpy electronic bangers. Remixes that would fail on a thought level, but somehow slap. Traditional instrumentation colliding with techno aggression.

I won’t even talk much just go and listen to the songs…especially ‘Ez-Ez’ or Akshay Khanna’s Baloch banger. Every musical bit is instantly addictive.

6. Violence is lovely, beautiful, original and hits your pulse
Absolutely, unexpected in a mainstream Bollywood film, is that operatic fun violence

There's a sequence where Ranveer’s Hamza cuts off fingers of a traitor in his target’s house….the double betrayal angle is chummah, but there’s more….As Hamza commits the act, he is busy threatening another character, while a finger slowly slides along to touch his foot….Camera gives space for that delicious madness. It's revolting. It's beautiful. It shouldn't work. It fucking works. And guess what, this is mainstream cinema man. Tarantino would love the fuck out of this film!

#Dhurandhar’s violence isn't sanitised. It's ugly, intimate, thrilling. Heads don't just explode…you see the gutter matter. This isn't Marvel quippiness. The film’s casual brutality reminded me why I love those gangster films so much.

Every action sequence is a sensory delight and I mean that as the highest compliment. This is haptic cinema: visceral, textured, felt. At least 90% of this film looks and moves like it was shot in actual space with actual bodies, and in an era of green-screen approximations, that tactility is revolutionary.

7. Finally, the point all of them are missing
Yes, Dhurandhar is a love letter to Modi-era decision-making. Yes, it offers narrative justifications for controversial policies. And yes, I didn’t enjoy that aspect of the film.

But When American cinema throws jingoism, America-Russia angle in thrillers, OTT shows, we nod along because the craft dazzles us. We sat through 3 hours of Top Gun: Maverick and called it 'a return to pure cinema.' We gave Christopher Nolan a pass for making the atomic bomb look like a lonely genius's passion project and said 'at least it's not CGI.' But suddenly, when Bollywood does nationalist cinema with actual craft, we remember we have principles? Fuck you.

We compartmentalise. We say, "Well, the politics are questionable, but the filmmaking..." And suddenly, we're sophisticated enough to separate art from ideology.
Why can't we extend the same courtesy to our own filmmakers?

I'm not asking you to agree with Dhar's politics. I'm asking you to recognise that #Dhurandhar is doing something Bollywood has forgotten how to do…build worlds, develop characters with competing motivations, let plots unfold rather than explode into isolated mass moments. This is classical genre filmmaking with modern muscularity

The question isn't whether the film is propaganda. It clearly is. The question is whether you can hold two truths simultaneously: that its ideology is suspect and that its craft is undeniable (which is where critics fell right into Sandeep Vanga’s trap with Animal and Kabir Singh)

After watching…dedicating 3 and a half hours of my finite existence to this gloriously excessive beast….I’m convinced that the woke critics bashing #Dhurandhar have forgotten what it feels like to be genuinely, viscerally excited in a theatre.

Dhar remembers something Bollywood forgot. Plot can be pleasure. Momentum can be pleasure. Watching a story twist and coil and bite its own tail can be pleasure.

I didn’t care that the politics were screaming. I didn’t care that the film was trying to sell me a worldview. I cared that I was alive inside the experience. That my pulse had synced to the edit. That I hadn’t felt this kind of cinematic voltage in years.

And maybe that’s the problem with all of us who watch too much, think too much. We want cinema to be good in the correct ways. #Dhurandhar is good in the wrong ways. The fun ways.

This is cinema….unapologetic, excessive, alive. And after years of Bollywood sleepwalking through sanitised mediocrity or South cinema dependance, I'll take problematic brilliance over safe blandness any day of the week.
#Dhurandhar doesn't just entertain. It electrifies. And if that makes me complicit in propaganda, so be it.
I'm booking my second ticket, it’s that freaking good bro!

What #Dhurandhar proves is that ideological cinema doesn't have to be artistically incompetent. The left got lazy thinking it had a monopoly on sophistication. Now the right has learned the grammar, got the vision, and has the technicians. The game changed in the last few years in the country.

[Nilay Bang @nilaybang]

@Ajain112 Buy a good portable projector. Use it to make every movie a small family event. Host sports screenings and invite people over. Take it with you on vacations and have a movie night memory from every place.

[Nilay Bang @nilaybang]

@heyytal You misspelled Virat Kohli as Rohit Sharma

[Nilay Bang @nilaybang]

@CSMIA_Official Absolute mess at Mumbai T2 pick up area. Gone from bad to worse. No planning and zero fucks given. Everyone in management associated with this abomination should hang their heads in shame and pls don’t call it a world class airport ever. @JM_Scindia @gautam_adani

[Dr. Rahul Baxi @baxirahul]

Mumbai airport is world class only till you land, collect luggage and come out for the pick up. The taxi/ Ola/ Uber pick up points are in a mess. No ventilation at some areas, traffic jams and no management. Something should be done to make this better.

#Mumbai

[Sanjay Lazar @sjlazars]

Hey @JayShah @BCCI @StarSportsIndia @FoxCricket
Can we pay to stop having #manjrekar on Comms ?

Lets make this hashtag #DumpManjrekar Trend !
Just a few of his jewels -

So when Mark Nicholas & Wasim Akram were praising Bumrah as one of the best in the world,
Manjrekar said "Is Bumrah upto Kapils level yet ? ".

"So much grass in Ranji, that average Bowlers like Vinay Kumar, bowling at 120km top the wickets tally"

"Oh Kohli is approaching a 100, we can expect the scoring rate to slow down"

" Shamis price at IPL is going down"

"Im tired of standing here"

There is nothing positive or objective he can say about the Indian team or its players. He tries to play up to the gora sahebs, by running down Indian cricketeers.
Can we get rid of him for good ? Anyone else but Manjrekar

#epicfail #banmanjrekar #DumpManjrekar #BGT2024 #INDvAUS

[Nilay Bang @nilaybang]

@bookmyshow Do you mind showing all the screen options for a movie together without the user having to click and toggle between 4 options and remember the show timings? Thanks.

[Nilay Bang @nilaybang]

@GabbbarSingh Lincoln Lawyer on Netflix. S3 has now released

[Nilay Bang @nilaybang]

@morpheuswhale Done😅

[Anirudh Garg @anirudhgarg_]

I still can't believe it, What happened with me!

It's Cheating

It was my turn, Ticket availability was around 30% each for 4 stands as soon as I selected, showed not available
This is literally heart break!

#BookMyShow #Coldplayindia #Coldplay @Bookmyshow_live @bookmyshow_sup

[Nilay Bang @nilaybang]

@Pvt_insaann Lagaan.
Rang De Basanti.

[Troll Football @TrollFootball]

India is Qatar's latest victim

[Nilay Bang @nilaybang]

@JM_Scindia @Ministry_CA Why does one still has to pay the INR 2k amount for Tatkal passport only in cash? When GoI is promoting digital payments and we have a homegrown platform like UPI, it is pathetic that one has to scramble in a PSK at the last min to arrange cash.@PMOIndia

[Shivam Vahia @ShivamVahia]

Just talking about my constituency:

Thousands of people deployed by ECI
Schools turned into poll booths.
Every Mumbai Police personnel on duty.
Additional/all units like MSF/SRPF deployed.
Hundreds of cabs hired full time for ECI staff.
BEST buses are makeshift transpo.
Thousands of EVMs are prepped up.
Zero Tolerance policing imposed since weeks.
Full crackdown on black markets.
Lakhs of water bottles for everyone.
Signing up new voters en mass.
Maintaining the electoral roll's integrity.

All this for just one constituency. Imagine the scale at which India does its elections.

And then some blind idiot sitting in Lutyens / Sweden / DC will write an 800 word tatti on how India's democracy is dead because GoI no longer provides them Blue Label every month.

[Nilay Bang @nilaybang]

@heyytal Disagree.

[The Cultural Tutor @culturaltutor]

This is the Hawa Mahal in Jaipur, India.

Even though its name means "Palace of the Winds" it isn't actually a palace.

In truth, the Hawa Mahal is something much more interesting...

[Nilay Bang @nilaybang]

@GabbbarSingh Pay a visit to the Blue Penny museum in Port Louis. You will find lots of such interesting bits of pieces of the island’s history. British actually fought the French for this strategically located nation so that they could continue to control India and the trade route.

[Nilay Bang @nilaybang]

@heyytal @neelang_dave Jhuth.

[Nilay Bang @nilaybang]

@bharatbetpf Haha..this is so funny. And the handle isn’t even tagged, just using the name has prompted this auto response!