Hindi
‘Ugly’…Horribly so!
MUMBAI: Ugly defies slotting. The closest it comes to in genre is 20th Century Hollywood noir thrillers shot in low lights. While the film adopts this pretentious low light option to look intelligent, its content lacks grossly in thrill of any kind. The film is a saga of double-crossing and backstabbing among friends and family members. But the content in the film has nothing to do with the film’s main story: that of kidnap of a 10 year girl.
Ronit Roy is the top cop married to the girl he loved in college. It was a love triangle, with Ronit, Tejeswini Kolhapure and Rahul Bhatt, now a full time struggler wanting to make it as a star. Rahul seems to have been the lucky one who marries Tejaswini. The couple get one girl child who is usually witness to the violence between Rahul and Tejaswini who are eventually divorced. Ronit, by virtue of being next in line, marries her. But their marriage is cold with Tejaswini having turned an alcoholic.
Saturday is the day for Rahul to meet his daughter, Kali, and as usual he takes her out. Rahul goes up to meet his casting director friend, Vineet Kumar Singh, leaving Kali in the car when Kali goes missing. She has been kidnapped. Initially, the film is all about finding her but soon turns in to blame game and finally into all the characters wanting to exploit the situation to their own advantage.
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Producers: DAR Motion Pictures, Phantom Films. Director: Anurag Kashyap. Cast: Ronit Roy, Rahul Bhatt, Vineet Kumar, Singh, Tejaswini Kolhapure, Surveen Chawla, Siddhanth Kapoor, Girish Kulkarni. |
Since nobody trusts anyone else they all suspect each other of the kidnap and don’t bother to check other possibilities. Ronit, being a cop, uses his office to tail and record the conversations of others including his wife, Tejaswini. He as well as his staff are completely devoted to this task. Rohit and Vineet are put behind bars and tortured in Ronit’s backroom. He has a motive since the court has restricted his visits to Kali to once a week only.
A missing ad is put in the newspapers and Tejaswinis’ crook brother, Siddhanth Kapoor, decides to take advantage. He calls up his sister demanding 50 lakh ransom to return the girl and Tejaswini asks her father, the only moneybag around, for 65 lakh, keeping her share in the ransom! Tejaswini gives her 15 lakh to her friend, Surveen Chawla, who happens to be Rahul’s current girlfriend. Surveen, an ex-item girl is married to a filmmaker who is useless in bed.
Surveen thinks she can use the 15 lakh left with her and she absconds with Rahul and Vineet. The latter is killed by Rahul in a frenzy, and Tejaswini decides to shoot Ronit even as Kali’s rotting body is lying dumped in a public place, the stink of which nobody smells until police does!
Script, direction as well as other aspects are negative in this senseless film. The characters don’t fit in our kind of films or mind-set. The film has been designed to be gloomy and drab with planned exposure of Mumbai’s poverty ridden locations and garbage so much so even the ACP Ronit’s office is in some dilapidated housing board tenement.
Ugly is a pretentious, bad film.
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.
