Hindi
‘The Silent Heroes:’ Childish film for children
It seems a nice idea to project differently-abled children in a challenging situation as a film to inspire other children. The Silent Heroes has been written and directed by a Mahesh Bhatt, not “the” veteran filmmaker Mahesh Bhatt.
Priyanka Panchal along with four others educates deaf and mute students in Uttarakhand. The school is surrounded by the scenic mountains of the Himalayas. Priyanka’s colleagues, for one of whom she has special feelings, become victims of an avalanche while on an expedition in the mountains. He dies leaving his dream of training a bunch of his deaf and mute students into adventurous mountaineers. Priyanka rues both, losing her love as well as his incomplete dream.
That is when she comes across Maanuv Bhardwaj, who specialises in survival tactics. The local mountaineering academy also gets involved and the project is taken up to train volunteer deaf and mute children for a mountain climbing expedition. It starts with training the kids. But, sadly for the children, Maanuv meets with an accident and is replaced by Simran Deep, a sadist without a cause, who acts bitchy for the sake of it and thinks it is futile to waste time on these children. She derides them all the time. She also makes sure she sets impossible targets for them.
While she is setting up the climb for children, Simran and her help both fall off a cliff and are rendered inactive. Now the very children she derided and thought good for nothing, use their other gifts they have instead of speech and ability to hear. They tend to her. They use their basic training and carry her to a river to await a stray rafter. But, when no rafter comes along, they use their bedding sheets and empty water bottles to put together a makeshift raft to carry her to the closest place of humanity where she can get medical attention without which she would need amputation of her leg.
While the children are carrying her on a raft they created, help is on the way in the form of Maanuv and Priyanka. The raft is coming apart in the heavy current of Gangotri but, things work out eventually.
This could have been an inspirational film for children. Instead, it is so slack and overly dramatised, that it is tough to sit through the film. The script just never stabilises and carries on painfully. As for direction, it is patchy. There are songs galore in the background, which do not mean anything. Editing is nonexistent. Background music is jarring. Performances are bad to passable.
The Silent Heroes is a worthless film, which serves no purpose whatsoever.
Producers: Kamal Birani, Mahesh Bhatt.
Director: Mahesh Bhatt.
Cast: Maanuv Bharadwaj, Priyanka Panchal, Mann Bagga, Simran Deep, Nirmal Kumar, TarunBhargav, Gurfareen Bano, Khwaish Gupta, Aashish Chauhan, Jaideep Rawat, SamrennBano, Prakhar Chamoli, Renu singh, ShwetaRawat, Radhika Chauhan, Nikhil Bhargav, Shalini Rawat.
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.
