Hindi
Abhay Deol and Omi Vaidya to attend Asian American Heritage Festival
MUMBAI: Indian actors Abhay Deol and Omi Vaidya will be attending the Asian American Heritage Festival, which is being presented by Ultimate Media and Sony Entertainment Television Asia.
The two actors will also be interacting with the audience at the festival, which is being held on 31 May, 2015 at the NJ Expo and Convention Center in Edison, NJ. The event marks the celebration of the Asian American Heritage month of May in the US.
The highlights of the Festival are as follows:
• Dance performances by top dance academies from the area
• Over 20 corporate sponsors and 100 vendors showcasing their products and services.
• A focus on the real estate market featuring builders from India and the US, realtors, brokers and mortgage lenders. The Asian Realtors Association of America (AREAA), the trade organization that promotes homeownership opportunities within the Asian American community, is one of the Festival’s sponsors.
• A wide range of food choices to go with free wine tasting by NJ’s very own Balic Winery.
• Free medical check-up by Robert Wood Johnson Hospital
• An array of shopping options – Asian American clothing, jewelry, art and handicrafts.
“Our goal was to create a unique experience for the members of the Asian American community, our corporate client and vendor partners. While there are several festivals and events targeted at individual segments of this vast community, for the first time, we are putting together an event of this scale and size that caters to the entire Asian American population,” said Ultimate Media CEO Mamta Narula.
“We have created a unique forum that combines the three things that appeals most to the Asian American population – entertainment, food and shopping. We have experienced an overwhelming response for the Festival as evidenced by the large number of corporate sponsors and vendors who have signed up, Sony Entertainment Television agreeing to be the grand media sponsor and the top dance schools agreeing to showcase their performances and acts,” added Narula.
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.
