Hindi
Chaalis Chaurasi nets Rs 13.5 mn at BO
MUMBAI: Chaalis Chaurasi has done fair business at single screens and collected Rs 13.5 million over the opening weekend.
Ghost has netted Rs 14 million during its first weekend while Sadda Adda‘s collections remained poor.
Players, the first of the three-film structural deal project between Viacom18 and Wave, has proved a debacle all around. Though Rs 360 million had been paid till the film’s delivery by Wave, the cut off recovery target was set at Rs 260 million with the balance amount to be treated as advance. Wave is said to have recovered about Rs 90 million by selling circuits excluding Delhi-UP, Punjab and Bombay.
The heist film has been able to collect a mere Rs 216 million in its first week. As things stand after the film’s poor show, Viacom 18 is reported to have offered Vidhya Balan starrer Kahani to Wave for nil consideration as compensation.
Don 2 has added Rs 50.5 million in its third week to take its total to Rs 1.08 billion.
Ladies Vs Rikcy Bahl‘s collections at the end of five week reached Rs 342 million.
The Dirty Picture collected Rs 50 million in its sixth week to take its total to Rs 830 million.
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.
