Hindi
No big win at the BO
MUMBAI: The law of averages catches up with Emraan Hashmi as he delivers another mediocre film. Kissing scenes cannot salvage a bad film. Despite being a stolen idea from a 1973 Hollywood classic, The Sting, the film lacked in scripting and content.
Paresh Rawal made it a bit tolerable but not enough to salvage it commercially. Raja Natwarlal had a below average opening on Friday and dropped by about 20 per cent on Saturday which indicates total rejection. Its release with the onset of Ganesh festival was a bad idea. The film has ended its opening weekend with Rs 14.4 crore.
Other films released, Identity Card, Last Benchers and Trip To Bhangarh met with ‘No audience no show’ status at most centres.
Mardaani, the first ‘A’ only certified film from the Yash Raj banner, fails to generate audience enthusiasm. The film fared average at the box office, but seeing that it is an economically produced film and coming from Yash Raj, which has controlled releasing overheads, it should make the recovery stage. The film collected Rs 22.97 crore for its first week. It added another Rs 5.24 crore for its second weekend taking its ten day total to Rs 28.21 crore.
Singham Returns manages to collect Rs 21.8 crore in its second week to take its two week total to Rs 131.8 crore. Entertainment has collected Rs 1.55 crore in its third week to take its three week tally to Rs 63.1 crore.
Kick has added Rs 25 lakh in its fourth week to take its four week tally to Rs 226.35 crore.
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.
