Hindi
Andhra HC asks Censor Board to clarify stand on The Dirty Picture
MUMBAI: The Andhra Pradesh High Court has directed the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) to come out with its stand regarding stalling the release of Ekta Kapoor‘s The Dirty Picture.
Vadlapatla Naga Prasad, the younger brother of the late actress, has asked the censor board not to clear the Vidya Balan-starrer for release. Prasad has claimed Smitha‘s character, played by Vidya, portrays her as a woman of loose morals through indiscriminate sex scenes.
Prasad has charged the filmmakers with filling the film with unrealistic and obscene scenes rather than trying to portray the true picture. He said that the filmmakers hadn‘t even spoken to him to get to know the real Smitha. Prasad insisted that her private life was different from what it is being portrayed in the film.
Although Prasad claimed that he had served a notice to the Censor Board asking it not to certify the film at all, B Mayur Reddy, counsel for the Censor Board told the Court that they had not received any such notice.
Justice Vilas V Afzalpurkar of the Andhra Pradesh High Court, while asking the petitioner to serve a copy to the counsel, directed the Censor Board to clear its stand within a week and deferred the case to coming Wednesday.
The Dirty Picture, produced by Balaji Telefilms and directed by Milan Luthria stars Vidya Balan, Emraan Hashmi, Naseeruddin Shah and Tusshar Kapoor among others, and is scheduled for release on 2 December.
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.
