Hindi
Bahubali continues to rule the box office as it pushes aside others in third week
The fact that films and cricket remain its dominant entertainers on television was evident when the Zee TV premiere of Dangal on 21 May and the final of the IPL T20 on Sony Max took the toll at the box office.
Last Friday saw the release of two totally different genre films – Hindi Medium and Half Girlfriend.
Hindi Medium is an entertaining family fare that also tackles a social issue relating to the education system in India; showing how every educational institution brands itself as ‘international’ and,while even the poor want their children to get English education, it is gradually going out of their reach. This is a small budget film with not much wasted on artistes while the limited locations help curtail the budget.
Half Girlfriend, on the other hand, is youth oriented romance. It used all the traditional stuff that a love story has been using through the history of storytelling: taming of the shrew, rich vs poor, chamcha friends around and, as a side attraction, it also touches on the Swachh Bharat issue stressing on the need for toilets in mofussil area schools so girl students do not shy away from enrol!ing. Sadly, all these elements were badly and predictably strewn together handled with inept direction.
Of the films released last week, Ram Gopal Varma’s idea of The Godfather, Sarkar 3, backfired yet again. Why is RPG trying to sell the same idea again if it was not accepted the first time? In filmmaking, you can’t be third time lucky with the same stuff!
Of the already running films, only Bahubali (Dubbed-Hindi) is sustaining. It is no secret that no dubbed film has ever done this kind of business while, it is also no secret that no Hindi films has reached such box office height either, be is a Salman Khan or an Aamir Khan starrer despite their being known to break barriers.
Box Office status wise:
*Half Girlfriend opened reasonably well but the word of mouth was mostly against its content. The film collected 29.1 crore over the weekend and may fall short of its target. The price at which its Indian theatrical rights have been sold, the film will need to reach a target of little short of 100 crore.
*Hindi Medium opened to an indifferent response on Friday, a good word of mouth helped the film as it gained on Saturday and Sunday to end its opening weekend with Rs 109 million. It should sail safe.
*Sarkar 3 has been very poor managing to collect barely Rs 82 million in its first week and is a loser.
*Meri Pyaari Bindu, with lesser number of screens compared to Sarkar 3, has been a slow starter but, being a mini budget enterprise, should not offset the producers’ balance sheet. The film collected Rs 86 million.
*Bahubali 2: The Conclusion (Hindi-Dubbed) maintains strong trends as the film collects a whopping Rs 676 million in its third week taking its three week total to Rs 4.495 billion – the highest box office collections ever for a film in the Hindi belt.
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.
