Hindi
Will the sports-films juggernaut roll on?
MUMBAI: With all eyes trained on next week‘s release of yet another sports oriented film the debate hots up. Have sports films done well in India or is Chak De an aberration? Film lovers, trade analysts, filmmakers, et al are analyzing this trend almost as if they have discovered a new sport.
People are going ballistic about the arrival of Vivek Agnihotri‘s Goal or is it Dhan Dhana Dhan Goal? Whatever…it is a film about football shot in UK. The producers of Goal UTV Motion Pictures claim to have recovered their cost of production even before the release of the film. But don‘t all producers recover their money prior to a film‘s release? What is important to observe is how the film fares with the audiences. A film is made for theatres and hence the litmus test is the theatrical release.
India has always been a nation of sports lovers. Cricket is an anthem for most Indians and now we have discovered hockey and may be football in the coming week. Chak De revived interest in hockey and the film‘s title song has become a sort of anthem cheering Indian teams to victory in various sporting events. A sport which had greats like Dhyan Chand to Dhanraj Pillai. And almost all of them have a story waiting to be told. But unfortunately it took a Shahrukh to leverage this forgotten sport.
Trade analyst Taran Adarsh says that not many filmmakers have attempted to make sports films. “Producers always felt that sports based films never did well at the box office. This is a myth. Everything boils down to content. I think that filmmakers should attempt to make such films.”
Jo Jeeta Wohi Sikander, Hip Hip Hurray (a film on football made almost twenty years ago), Iqbal, Lagaan, Tara rum pum were all sport-centred films. With the exception of Lagaan and to a small extent Iqbal none of them made it big at the box office. But the Chak De of yesteryears was the 1956 classic Naya Daur. The film was a hit when it was released five decades ago and even now when it was recently released in its new coloured avatar.
So what is it there to be so gung-ho about now? Goal may have more to it than football. But it is being promoted as a sports film to cash in on the current rage for such films. The kind of money that has been pumped in to generate viewer interest could be used to make a Bheja Fry.
Taran Adarsh is optimistic and believes the film will do well. “Sports and films do go together. Today audiences want to listen to good stories. It could be sports based themes. As long as you have a good story the film will do well.”
So for the meanwhile the juggernaut rolls on with more such films to hit the screens. The soon to release Raaste, Mazhab, Cycle Kick may score a goal.
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.
