Hindi
Hindi remake of Dookudu to star Salman Khan
MUMBAI: If everything goes well, Mahesh Babu‘s Telugu film Dookudu is set to be remade in Hindi with Salman Khan in the lead.
Said script writer Kona Venkat, who worked on Ready in Telugu and Hindi and is also associated with Anees Bazmee‘s No Entry sequel and Sohail Khan‘s Sher Khan, “Sreenu, who directed Ready in Telugu, is keen to remake Dookudu in Hindi with Salman. In fact, the lead character‘s heroism suits Salman bhai perfectly. We won‘t need to make alterations for the Hindi version.”
The Telugu film has been doing excellent business all over earning till date Rs 300 million. While the Mahesh Babu film cost Rs 350 million to make, the budget set aside for the Hindi version has been pegged at Rs 600 million.
Interestingly, Dookudu was written keeping Khan in mind. But there is a hitch that needs to be solved. While the protagonist in the Telugu film is a cop, Khan doesn’t want to do a cop film till the Dabaang sequel. Airing his views Venkat said if the filmmakers of the Telugu remake decide to wait till Dabangg 2 is ready, then there should be no reason for Salman to decline the movie.
The filmmakers are awaiting Khan to see the film and green signal its making.
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.
