Hindi
Slumdog sweeps Baftas with 7 awards
MUMBAI: Pacing up to set new records for itself, Academy Award winner Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire has bagged seven top honours at the British Film Academy Awards (Bafta) after being nominated in 11 categories.
At the Bafta, the rags-to-riches story not only won Boyle the best director award, but also brought India’s coveted musician A R Rehman the award for best music. The other Indian to sweep a Bafta Award this year for Slumdog was Resul Pookutty for sound mixing.
Also, apart from winning the best film title, the Mumbai-based story further notched top honours screenplay (by Simon Beufoy), editing and cinematography.
Slumdog Millionaire tells the story of a young, uneducated man from the slums of Mumbai who appears on the Indian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? (Kaun Banega Crorepati– Hindi version) and exceeds people‘s expectations, arousing the suspicions of the game show host and of law enforcement officials.
Meanwhile, Dev Patel, the lead protagonist in the film who was also nominated in the best actor category for Slumdog, lost the prize to Hollywood actor Mickey Rourke for The Wrestler.
British actor Kate Winslet pocketed the best actress award for her role as a Nazi concentration camp guard in The Reader.
While Spain‘s Penelope Cruz won the best supporting actress award for Vicky Cristina Barcelona, late Heath Ledger of Australia was named the best supporting actor for his outstanding role as the Joker in The Dark Knight.
Meanwhile, Slumdog will be eyeing more honours at the Oscars where it has got 10 nominations including for best picture. The film already won the Golden Globe award for best drama.
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.
