Hindi
A tepid box office week
MUMBAI: The first Friday jinx seems to continue as three out of four new releases of the first Friday of 2013 had to be discontinued unceremoniously from many cinema halls.
Table No 21, thanks to Paresh Rawal in top billing, is the only one to survive as well as have some collection figures to show for itself. The film has managed to collect Rs 58 million during its first weekend. The collections in North have been badly affected due to severe cold conditions.
The three films withdrawn by the exhibitors are Rajdhani Express, Meri Shadi Karao and Dehraadun Diary for want of audience response.
Arbaaz Khan‘s sequel to Dabangg starring brother Salman Khan in the lead role of Chulbul Pandey, Dabangg 2 has just about exhausted its potential at the end of the second week as the collections showed a peak of Rs 80 million on Sunday and went down to Rs 20 million on Thursday, collecting Rs 315 million in all and taking its two-week total to Rs 1.31 billion.
Akshay Kumar and Asin‘s Khiladi 786 collected Rs 10.5 million in its fourth week. The movie‘s box-office net now stands at Rs 658 million.
Aamir Khan, Rani Mukerjee and Kareena Kapoor Khan starrer Talaash added Rs 7.5 million in its fifth week to take its total collections to Rs 945.6 million.
Four releases are lined up for Friday, 11 January. The exhibitors, especially multiplexes, expect Matru Ki Bijlee Ka Mandola to bring the audiences back to cinemas after a couple of dull weeks. The release problems for Vishwaroopam with multiplexes still continue as of today because the producers have planned to release the film on the DTH platform first with which the multiplex owners are not in agreement. The other two releases are Gangoobai and Four Two Ka One.
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.
