Hindi
Warner Bros’ Chandni Chowk… garners Rs 450 million
MUMBAI: Warner Brothers‘ maiden Hindi movie Chandni Chowk to China has collected Rs 450 million at the box office in the opening weekend.
Made on a budget of Rs 800 million, the movie has pulled in Rs 330 million from the Indian market while the remaining Rs 120 million has come from overseas.
“Chandni Chowk to China has got the widest release for a Bollywood film, releasing across over 1500 screens. The film was released across 1400 screens in India while it saw a 135-screen release in the US. Apart from the US, the film has witnessed a good response in the UK and UAE too,” claims Warner Bros India director sales Neeraj Goswami.
Chandni Chowk to China, which has already reached markets like Hong-Kong, Malaysia, Norway and Europe, will now be released in Japan with sub-titles.
“We will be releasing Chandni Chowk to China in Japan on 23 January with sub-titles,” Goswami adds.
The Akshay Kumar-starrer is a co-production between Warner Brothers and Ramesh Sippy that saw a simultaneous release worldwide on 16 January.
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.
