Hindi
Mantostaan….For a select few
If you go by the title, it is not really designed to draw the audience to the cinema halls. Also, not many in today’s movie-going audience would know about Sadat Hasan Manto. Talking of Staan, Manto had none. He was not quite happy in India before Partition nor when he migrated to the newly formed country, Pakistan. The Staan in the title refers to Manto’s own space he created for himself.
Mantostaan takes four of Manto’s short stories for this film. The four stories, all set around the Partition are: Khol Do, Aakhri Salute, Thanda Ghosht and Assignment.
These omnibus short story stuff has been tried earlier in films, the last one in memory being Vinay Shukla’s Mirch, which told four stories written by the Italian writer, Giovanni Boccaccio, who in turn had copied his collection of short stories from the Indian legends of The Panchtantra, among others.
That said about films with multiple stories, Mantostaan’s four stories run simultaneously with each other. And, that, at times affects the narration. One feels that telling these four short stories independent of each other may have been more effective.
The stories depict violence that took place during the Partition.
In Khol Do, a man trying to go to Pakistan along with his wife and daughter survives but remembers his wife being killed. When he comes to a refugee camp, he searches for his daughter. Then, he is promised by some young men who risk going back to Amritsar and bring women and children back, that they will search for his daughter.
Another story, Assignment, is about a retired Muslim judge stuck in his house in Amritsar with his daughter and son as most other Muslims have moved to safer locations. It is Eid day and a Sikh who owed the judge a favour pays a visit even as a mob waits down the street to finish their task.
Aaakhri Salute is about a banter between an Indian soldier and a Pakistani, both serving at the border.
The fourth story is about a man trying to hide a macabre truth about himself, something he did during the riots, from his woman.
Manto, for those initiated, makes for taut reading, but here, in the film, it does not really grip you. Direction shows lack of experience.
Performances are mediocre, save for Raghuvir Yadav.
Producers: Rahat Kazmi, Tariq Khan, Aditya Pratap Singh.
Director: Rahat Kazmi.
Cast: Raghuvir Yadav, Sonal Sehgal, Veerendra Saxena and Rahat Kazmi.
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.
