Hindi
Indiavideo.org celebrating 100 years of Hindi cinema
MUMBAI: To mark this historic occasion of Bollywood turning hundred this year, www.indiavideo.org has launched a year-long celebration to take the viewers to the key moments in the momentous journey of Hindi cinema.
As part of the centenary fete, the website will feature 365 films carefully chosen to represent the history of Bollywood. Here one can watch some all-time hit films, some trend setters in storytelling and techniques and more importantly, films by which some ordinary men and women rose to stardom.
The special centenary gallery on the website, and its YouTube channel, has already become a hit among Bollywood fans spread across the world. Clippings of the selected movies are presented along with a brief talk on the specialties and historical aspects of the film. The nearly two-minute movie will have the best moments in a film.
The films were chosen by researcher and columnist Vijay Kumar Balakrishnan, a collector of Bollywood posters, gramophone records, song books, vintage films etc, who has been exploring Bollywood for the past 40 years.
“From Dadasaheb Phalke, V Shantaram, Himanshu Rai, Vijay Bhatt, Fateh Lal, Sohrab Modi, Damle, Bimal Roy, Mehboob Khan, Raj Kapoor to G P Sippy, Mahesh Bhatt, Shekhar Kapur, Mira Nair, Aamir Khan, Ram Gopal Varma and Karan Johar, the gallery will introduce personalities who influenced the industry from time to time,” said Balakrishnan in a statement.
He added that the gallery has rare and exclusive visuals of old films like Raja Harishchandra, Ayodhya ka Raja, Pukar, Kapal Kundala, Izzat, Doctor, Maya Machindra among others.
The project is supported by Culture Shoppe, an online cultural gift shop and Mulamoottil Eye Hospital, a super specialty eye hospital.
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.
