Hindi
Box Office : ‘Great Grand Masti’ fails; ‘Sultan’ continues its rule
MUMBAI: Great Grand Masti turns out to be one massive PJ; on its makers really, as the moviegoers rejected it from day one, show one. This is one film that fails to cash in on the brand equity built by its previous two installments, Masti and Grand Masti, both of which had fared reasonably well.
Lacking a single moment of fun and laughter, original or borrowed, the film opens to poor houses and ends its opening weekend with a poor 7.8 crore.
*The long wait by the exhibition trade, especially the multiplex chains who need to feed multiple screens at each property every week, finally fructifies with Salman Khan’s Eid ul Fitr release, Sultan. This Salman film also justifies the trade’s faith in his films.
Sultan was planned to release on the Eid day but, Eid falling one day later did not in any way affect the film’s opening day draw, which was also thanks partly to an unprecedented advance booking and also to enhanced admission rates as the film closed its day one with 36.54 crore. It went ahead to end its five day extended weekend with 180.36 crore and the nine day week with 229.16 crore mark.
The film maintained well in its second week, which is as good as an open week with virtually no opposition from the solo release of the week, Great Grand Masti. It has added 34.07 crore during its second weekend to take its 12 day tally to 263.23 crore.
Rest of the inconsequential films, released during the Ramzan month and before that, have generally been losers.
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.
