Hindi
Percept signs on Madhur Bhandarkar for two years
MUMBAI: Percept Talent Management (PTM) has exclusively signed on Bollywood director Madhur Bhandarkar as their latest talent.Madhur is following the cues of Priyanka Chopra and Karan Johar who are also Percept’s talents.
The contract has been signed up for a period of 2 years. Percept will handle Madhur‘s entire gamut of professional portfolio including endorsements, PR, event appearances and showcasing, among other services it provides.
Percept Holdings‘ joint MD, Mr Shailendra Singh said, “Our relationship with Madhur goes way back, even before the release of Page 3. We have teamed up successfully to provide some entertaining and meaningful cinema to the audiences in the past. We now move on to a different platform in our relationship, as we have signed him on as our latest talent. We look forward to working with him and welcome him back as a part of the Percept family.”
About the sign-up with PTM, Bhandarkar remarked, “My last 3 films have been with them. Their professionalism and business acumen has impressed me a lot, and I am delighted to be a part of Percept once again, albeit in a new role.”
With the critically acclaimed Chandni Bar, Madhur became a force to reckon with in the industry. He has since created quite a reputation for making realistic cinema by partnering with Percept in the trilogy that included Page 3, Corporate and Traffic Signal.
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.
