Hindi
Big Home Entertainment signs licensing deal with Paramount
MUMBAI: Big Music and Home Entertainment, the Reliance ADAG company, has entered into a licensing agreement with Paramount Home Entertainment.
The deal provides Big Music and Home Entertainment, the exclusive home video distribution rights for Paramount Home Entertainment, DreamWorks Animation SKG Inc and DreamWorks Pictures in India and Sri Lanka.
BIG Music and Home Entertainment will market and distribute home video products from the libraries of Paramount Pictures, DreamWorks Pictures, DreamWorks Animation, Paramount Vantage, MTV Films and Nickelodeon Movies.
Paramount’s library consists of titles such as The Godfather films, The Ten Commandments, Roman Holiday, the Mission Impossible series and Transformers.
DreamWorks Animation’s titles include the Shrek series, Shark Tale and Madagascar while DreamWorks Pictures’ catalogue includes A Beautiful Mind, American Beauty and Munich.
BIG Music and Home Entertainment CEO Kulmeet Makkar said, “Paramount Home Entertainment Global is one of the largest home entertainment brands in the world. BIG Music and Home Entertainment, with its expertise, focus and resources, will work toward tapping into the huge potential that Paramount’s library offers in India and Sri Lanka.”
Paramount Home Entertainment Asia Pacific regional director Zubair Hassan added, “We recognise the developments taking place in the Indian marketplace and the opportunity they provide for our titles. Given the breadth and quality of our film slate, Paramount is confident that Big Music and Home Entertainment will help to ensure that our titles are made available to our Indian and Sri Lankan consumers.”
Big Music and Home Entertainment has already announced licensing agreements with Warner Home Video and Universal Pictures, to market and distribute their home video products.
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.
