Hindi
Kannada film body bans actress Nikihta Thukral for 3 years
BANGALORE: Following the arrest and subsequent collapse and hospitalisation of Sandalwood actor Darshan, and the Kannada Film Producers Association (KFPA) meeting with Darshan’s wife Vijaylakshmi, the KFPA has decided to impose a ban on actress Nikitha Thukral for three years from acting in Sandalwood movies.
Thukral is a Punjabi who has acted in a number of Hindi and South Indian films, including Kannada films, of which three are with Darshan as a female lead.
The episode and the subsequent fall out seem to be right out of an emotional South Indian pot boiler filmy drama.
A few days ago, Darshan was arrested for beating up his wife who lodged a police complaint against her husband and also named his co-star Thukral in her police compliant. There were reports of a few violent incidents that took place in Bangalore allegedly perpetuated by Darshan’s fans when they heard of his arrest.
Thukral was at Mumbai when the KFPA’s ban was announced. She is in consultation with her lawyers to take action against the KFPA’s unilateral decision as well the people involved in tarnishing her image. The actress says that she has never been projected in such bad light during the six years that she has been acting.
Darshan claimed that he was drunk and was not aware of his actions when he brutalized his wife who had been admitted to a private hospital for treatment and discharged from it on Sunday. Some KFPA members met Vijaylaksmi at the hospital and based on the discussions with her and the police complaint, decided to impose a three-year ban on Thukral as a lesson for other artistes to be more professional.
Acting on Vijaylakshmi’s complaint, the police took Drashan into judicial custody and lodged him at Parappana Agrahara Central Prison where the actor later collapsed.
The prison hospital doctors shifted Darshan first to NIMHANS and later on to the Rajiv Gandhi Institute of Chest Diseases (RGICD) early on Saturday evening where he was diagnosed as suffering from a mild liver infection and a bronchial asthma condition that had got aggravated due to the prevalent weather conditions and high stress levels. A number of rules and norms have been violated by the concerned authorities in allowing all the bigwigs of the Kannada film industry to visit the actor at the RGICD’s Intensive Care Unit.
Meanwhile, on being discharged from the hospital on Sunday, Vijaylaksmi promptly visited her husband at RGICD and has filed an affidavit for the bail of her assailant husband. The case which was to come up for hearing today has been deferred to tomorrow. Legal experts are sure that the actor will be allowed bail and is unlikely to go the Parappana Agrahara again. As per the latest updates, charges under section 307 (attempt to murder) lodged against Drashan have been diluted to petty assault.
In a further twist, just a day after Vijaylaxmi filed a case against her husband which included dowry harassment, her sister-in-law – her brother Vasudev’s wife Srilakshmi has filed a dowry harassment case at the Girinagar Polic Station against Vijaylakshmi, Vijaylakshmi’s mother and Vasudev on Saturday last.
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.
