Hindi
Barkhaa…Who?
MUMBAI: Barkhaa is an old fashioned story revisited. It is about a city lad on a visit to a picturesque location where he falls for another visitor. As a modern version, the theme is about one sided love, an obsession and about his love ending up in a dance bar.
Taaha Shah, a reputed and wealthy lawyer’s son, is on a visit to Haryana, where he spots Sara Loren and falls in love with her. She is not aware of his feelings or scrutiny. But, soon, Sara has vanished from the scene and Tahaa does not know where to look for her.
Back to routine, he is asked to run an errand for his lawyer father, Puneet Issar, to meet a dance bar owner client of his. Taaha is invited by the bar owner to come visit his bar. When Taaha does so, he gets an unpleasant surprise. Sara is one of the bar dancers at the joint. Now, Taaha may be obsessed with Sara but, for a reputed, traditional Tahaa, son of a renowned lawyer, a bar girl is not supposed to be an ideal object of romance.
Since Taaha is in a quandary as his love for Sara is overpowering, he is drawn to the bar constantly. He lands up there and takes to drinking. He drowns his sorrows and shock of his love being a dance bar girl by just looking at her every day without communicating.
Sara is not a mere bar girl, she is talented too and has penned a book, which Taaha is invited to inaugurate. After reading the book, Taaha learns the story of Sara’s life, her betrayal by Taaha’s own friend and her having been left with a child out of wedlock. The book mentions no author’s name but Taaha somehow connects it to Sara.
It is time for the old-fashioned melodrama. Taaha is summoned to his hospitalized mother. Meanwhile, Issar is plotting to get Sara out of Taaha’s life. As a reputed lawyer, he can’t have a bar girl as his daughter in law. But, such films are all about happy endings. So be it.
Sara acts well and has a good presence. Taaha does well. The direction is fair and the film has a pleasant musical score.
But with no face value and a lack of promotion, Barkhaa will only add to numbers, nothing to box office.
Producer: Shaban Hashmi.
Director: Shadaa Mirza.
Cast: Sara Loren, Taaha Shah, Puneet Issar.
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.
