Hindi
Madhuri Dixit to star in Dedh Ishqiya
MUMBAI: The sequel of the 2010 hit Ishqiya is finally coming up. The ball has been put to roll with Madhuri Dixit Nene signing on the dotted line to play the female lead in Vishal Bhardwaj’s Dedh Ishqiya. She has been paired with Naseeruddin Shah.
This edition will not have Vidya Balan as in the first part. Balan had recently said, “In the first part, the two men (Naseeruddin Shah and Arshad Warsi) come to my village to meet me. In the next part, they will go elsewhere, so obviously they will meet someone new and not me. Anyways, I like Madhuri Dixit and I`m happy that she is in the sequel.”
Dedh Isqiya is about the adventures of Shah and Arshad Warsi and takes off from where Ishqiya ended. It is said that Dixit Nene will play a grey character of a begum whose style of making love is very royal (nawabi). It’s her habit to spout shayari while wooing her man.
Abhishek Chaubey had directed the rural drama, which opened to great reviews and box office collections. The film was co-produced by Vishal Bhardwaj and Shemaroo Entertainment.
The film will start rolling in May.
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.
