Hindi
Amitabh Bachchan announces IIFA nominations for 2008
MUMBAI: IIFA brand ambassador Amitabh Bachchan has announced the nominations for the Idea IIFA Awards 2008. He also announced the opening of voting lines for the IIFA awards to audiences of Indian cinema across the world.
The Idea IIFA awards 2008 would be held in Bangkok on 8 June.
This year, Guru, Chak De India, Jab We Met, Om shanti Om, Life In A Metro and Partner will be fighting for best picture category. For best performance (male) Abhishek Bachchan (Guru), Akshay Kumar (Bhool Bhulaiyaa), Salman Khan (Partner), Shah Rukh Khan (Chak De India) and Shahid Kapoor (Jab We Met) are the nominees. Aishwarya Rai (Guru), Deepika Padukone (Om Shanti Om), Kareena Kapoor (Jab We Met), Tabu (Cheeni Kum) and Vidya Balan (Bhool Bhulaiyaa) will fight it out for the best actress award.
The announcement of the nominations was done as a result of the industry voting for the IIFA awards in March. Results of the industry voting were audited by PriceWatehouse Coopers, the auditing firm for the IIFAs and Oscars.
Now fans of Indian cinema can cast their votes till the end of May on the official website for IIFA awards.
Bachchan said, “Nothing celebrates the grandeur of Indian cinema as extravagantly as the IIFAs. It is indeed a great pleasure to announce the nominations for IDEA IIFA Awards 2008 and to open the voting for the coveted awards on IIFA Buzz.com.”
Idea Cellular chief marketing officer Pradeep Shrivastava said, “IIFA Awards offers us the best platform to demonstrate the true essence of mobile and entertainment convergence. Our customers will have access to specially created merchandise, contests, video and MMS downloads and several other value added services.”
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.
