Hindi
Sanjay Dutt sings Qawali after 41 years in Apoorva Lakhia’s ‘Zanjeer’
Actor Sanjay Dutt, who had acted as member of a qawali party forty-one years earlier in his father Sunil Dutt’s Reshma aur Shera as a child artiste, will be rendering a qawali once again as the iconic Sher Khan in the forthcoming re-imagined version of Zanjeer.
While the new version being released on 7 September stars Ramsharan and Priyanka Chopra with Sanjay Dutt, the original starred megastar Amitabh Bachchan – who was also an artiste in Reshma aur Shera – with Jaya Bachchan.
Sanjay’s formal debut had come years later in his father’s film Rocky, which went on to be a massive hit. Today after 41 years in the industry, Sanjay has over 150 films in his kitty.
Dutt has donned a never-seen-before look. His look as Sher Khan which was revealed some time back in the trailer has already been admired by audiences.
The actor himself was extremely psyched about doing the qawali sequence in the song Khochey Pathan Ki Zubaan and director Apoorva Lakhia is confident that this will be one of Sanjay Dutt’s most memorable performances on the big screen.
Along with Sanjay Dutt Apoorva Lakhia’s tour de force Zanjeer stars an elite ensemble cast of Ram Charan, Priyanka Chopra, Prakash Raj, Mahie Gill and Atul Kulkarni.
Zanjeer has been produced by Reliance Entertainment, Puneet Prakash Mehra, Sumeet Prakash Mehra and Flying Turtle Films, and co-produced by Rampage Motion Pictures.
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.
