Hindi
ABCD, Special 26 continue to do well
MUMBAI: Murder 3 is a Bhatt Brothers formula that fails this time. Lacking in face value and music to back it, the film has had a weak opening and a poor opening weekend. The film managed to collect Rs 112.5 million in its opening weekend.
Viviek Oberoi starrer Jayantabhai Ki Love Story, a rather under-publicised and badly released film, is a write off from day one; it managed to collect just about Rs 17 million for the opening weekend.
Special 26 has been helped to a great extent by good word of mouth as the film, which opened slow on Friday, 8 February, went on to pick up over the next two days, peaking on Sunday and then going on to maintain steady collections through the week to end its opening seven days with Rs 418 million. The film also benefits the most due to the poor new releases — Murder 3 and Jayantabhai Ki Love Story — to hold well in its second weekend to collect Rs 116 million taking its 10 day total to Rs 534 million.
ABCD: Any Body Can Dance has appealed to youth and multiplex patrons. Its best performance is in western India while the east is not up to mark. The film collected Rs 278 million for its first week.
Vishwaroop has not been able to impress the Hindi moviegoer. The film collected Rs 10.5 million in its second week taking its tally to Rs 128 million.
Race2 collected another Rs 38 million for its third week taking its total to Rs 964.3 million.
The coming Friday will see two new releases. While Kai Po Che is the second Chetan Bhagat novel to be adapted for a film (after 3 Idiots) and has immediate identification in Western India, Zila Ghaziabad has a highly UP flavour. So much so that the Delhi-UP distributors are very enthusiastic about the film and plan to release it at all the 20 multiplexes in Ghaziabad and all five in Noida besides booking maximum single screens in the circuit.
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.
