Hindi
Kolkata’s production house debuts in Bollywood with ‘Vartak Nagar’
MUMBAI: Kolkata’s homegrown production house Adarsh Telemedia with Dione Entertainment has teamed up with Bollywood director Kunal Kohli to produce their maiden Bollywood venture, Vartak Nagar- The Story Of Four Crows.
Directed by debutant Atul Taishete, Vartak Nagar stars Jimmy Sheirgill as a powerful underworld don and the MTV Roadies famed Raghu Ram as a mill union leader in the central roles.
Talking about the movie, producer Amit Agarwal said, “The film is a gritty hard hitting film and for Kunal too this has been a step away from the romantic films that he is usually associated with. We were hunting for a film that mixed content with entertainment and as a story had a unique universal appeal.”
“We are currently locking down on more Bollywood films as well and what we can promise is that each one of our future projects will be as content driven, as exciting and will be as universally appealing as Vartak Nagar,” he added.
Set against the Great Bombay Mill Strike and the gangster era of the 1980’s, the film deals with the lives of four lower middle class school going friends and their lives as impacted by the strike, their loss of innocence and their journey which takes them through the highs of friendship, the lows of betrayal and eventually redemption.
Hindi
Remembering Gyan Sahay, the lens behind film, television and advertising
From a puppet rabbit selling poppadums to Hindi cinema, he framed it all.
MUMBAI: There are careers, and then there are canvases. Gyan Sahay, the veteran cinematographer, director, and producer who passed away on 10 March 2026 in Mumbai, had one of the latter. Over several decades in the Indian film and television industry, he turned lenses, lights, and the occasional puppet rabbit into something approaching art.
A graduate of the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) in Pune, Sahay built his reputation as a director of photography across a career that stretched from the early 1970s all the way to the digital age. He was the kind of craftsman who understood that a well-composed shot is not merely a technical achievement but a quiet act of storytelling.
For most Indians of a certain age, however, Sahay will forever be the man behind the rabbit. His direction of the iconic long-running television commercial for Lijjat Papad, featuring its now-legendary puppet bunny, gave the country one of its most cheerfully persistent advertising images. It was the sort of work that sneaks into the national subconscious and takes up permanent residence.
His big-screen credits as cinematographer include Anokhi Pehchan (1972), Pagli (1974), Pas de Deux (1981), and Hum Farishte Nahin (1988). In 1999, he stepped behind a different kind of camera altogether, making his directorial debut with Sar Ankhon Par, a drama that featured Vikas Bhalla and Shruti Ulfat, with a cameo by Shah Rukh Khan for good measure.
On television, Sahay was particularly prized for his command of multi-camera production setups, a skill that made him a go-to technician for large-scale shows and reality programmes. In an industry that has never been especially patient with complexity, he was the calm hand on the rig.
In later life, Sahay turned teacher. He participated regularly in masterclasses and Digi-Talks, often hosted by organisations such as Bharatiya Chitra Sadhna, sharing hard-won wisdom on cinematography, the comedy of timing in a shot, and the sweeping changes brought by the shift from celluloid to digital. He was also said to have been involved in a project concerning a biographical film on Infosys co-founder N.R. Narayana Murthy.
Tributes from the film industry poured in following the news of his passing, with colleagues remembering him as a senior cameraman who served as a rare bridge between two entirely different eras of Indian cinema. That is, perhaps, the finest thing one can say of any craftsman: he kept up, and he brought others along with him.
