Hindi
Sag to hold meeting in LA over strike authorisation vote
MUMBAI: The Screen Actors Guild (Sag) will hold a town hall meeting in Los Angeles on 17 November in the evening. Sag is seeking a strike authorisation vote from its members and ballots go out next month.
Sag notes that the Association of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) has failed to address the needs of actors at the bargaining table despite the efforts of the negotiating team and the intervention of a federal mediator.
A Sag statement says, “Your national negotiating committee has directed that a strike authorisation ballot be sent to paid up Sag members for their consideration and approval.
“This Town Hall meeting will give Hollywood members an update on the negotiations and a chance to ask questions about the upcoming strike authorization ballot referendum. A strike authorisation from Sag members will show the AMPTP that the unique needs of actors cannot be addressed by a pattern of bargaining. Actors needs must be addressed for deal to be made.”
The AMPTP says that it hopes that working actors will study its contract offer carefully and come to the conclusion that no strike can solve the problems that have been created by Sag‘s own failed negotiation strategy.
Meanwhile, several top actors including George Clooney, Tom Hanks, Cameron Diaz and Edward Norton have signed a letter that is being circulated among Sag‘s membership. The letter looks to persuade actors not to give the authorisation to the Sag board to strike.
“We feel very strongly that Sag members should not vote to authorise a strike at this time. We don‘‘t think that an authorisation can be looked at as merely a bargaining tool. It must be looked at as what it is an agreement to strike if negotiations fail.
“None of our friends in the other unions are truly happy with the deals they made in their negotiations. Three years from now all the union contracts will be up again at roughly the same time. At that point if we plan and work together with our sister unions we will have incredible leverage,” the letter says.
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.
