Hindi
India and Asia should create their own Oscar-level awards, says Shekhar Kapur
New Delhi: Veteran filmmaker Shekhar Kapur said today that Indians should not be so crazy about the Oscars when Asia was vibrant enough to have its own Oscar-like awards.
The ace filmmaker had the media and others present for the 12th Osian‘s Cinefan Festival for Asian and Arab Cinema glued to every word he said during an interaction with Osian‘s Chairman Neville Tuli on “Indian Cinema, World Cinema film festivals and cinematic heritage”.
Shekhar, whose ‘Elizabeth‘ had won Oscars, said few knew that the Oscars were launched because March is a lean month in the United States and so it was thought that there should be some activity relating to films which will keep people enthused.
He also said it was not correct to say that filmmakers in India did not plan for marketing when they plan their films, but said the budgets were far lower than those for Hollywood.
He said it was wrong to claim India has the largest film industry in the world. China is ahead of India because it is creating new infrastructures for cinema. It had a very strong domestic market for cinema, worth almost $ 100,000.
Therefore, the only way to improve the Indian market is to improve the local market for cinema by building greater infrastructure such as financial institutions to help the film industry.
He also felt that Indians should look more towards Asia than towards the west in terms of developing its cinema.
He said that Indians would any day prefer to see an Indian film rather than a Hollywood film, and this potential should be recognized by the film industry.
He said the west had picked up many things from India and films there had more emotions now because they had also realized what people wanted to see.
Shekhar also had his complaints against the Central Board for Film Certification and said many countries did not have any censorship and those that did had better and more rational regulations in place.
Mr Tuli said that the OCFF this year was stressing on freedom of thought and expression and showing films that proved to be milestones in their fight for their right of freedom of expression.
He also said Osian‘s was helping to build the proper infrastructure for creative freedom and also bring about a vibrant film culture that could co-exist with other forms of art.
Shekhar was at the Festival to participate in the panel on ‘The Water Landscape‘ held yesterday as part of the section on environmental films.
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.
