Hindi
Anupam Kher launches first Bollywood acting school in London
MUMBAI: Hindi film actor Anupam Kher has launched a London chapter of his Actor Prepares, making it Britain‘s first official Bollywood acting school.
The school aims to improve the quality of Bollywood‘s notorious over-the-top hammy acting and represents the next step in the growing connection between Britain and the Hindi film industry.
“I am trying to kill off a certain style of cliched Bollywood acting. It‘s already dying so it is the right time to do this international school,” Anupam told IANS.
The school is to be based in the West London neighbourhood of Ealing, home to Ealing Studios which made a string of well known English films in the 1950s.
It will work out of the Ealing Institute of Media, and 60 students will be admitted in the first year.
Although most students are expected to be South Asians, Anupam said there was interest among white Britons as well.
The school is a partnership between Actor Prepares, Heathrow City Partnership, a local not-for-profit organisation, and the Ealing Institute of Media, which is a part of Ealing, Hammersmith and West London College.
“It will provide the first course of its kind in which actors from Indian cinema and elsewhere come to Britain to pass on their inside knowledge,” added Kher.
Stars such as Boman Irani, Tabu, Urmila Matondkar and filmmaker Mahesh Bhatt, who are the visiting faculty at Actor Prepares Mumbai, are scheduled to be involved in the teaching programme.
Courses will include martial arts, yoga, dance, music and Hindi, diction, improvisation and acting on camera.
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.
