Hindi
Anupam and Lisa get drunk: Behind the scenes of ‘The Shaukeens’
MUMBAI: To give a scene reality touch while shooting, actor Anupam Kher and Lisa Haydon downed a little too much red wine on the sets of The Shaukeens.
Tired after a hard day at work, where the lead actors Anupam Kher, Annu Kapoor, Piyush Mishra and Lisa Haydon were scheduled to travel to three different locations to shoot three different scenes in one day, with each location about two hours away from the next. Haydon and Kher decided to break away from the tradition of using mock drinks for shooting the last scene for the day where they were to be filmed while drinking wine by having actual red wine.
By the time the final shot was taken, the two had downed three to four glasses each, a source from the sets revealed. “Luckily, it was the last scene for the day. So, no one noticed that the actors were actually in high spirits.”
The Shaukeens is a remake of 1982 comedy movie Shaukeen directed by Basu Chatterjee. It stars Anupam Kher, Annu Kapoor, Piyush Mishra and Lisa Haydon along with Akshay Kumar in a special appearance. Produced by Cine1 Studios, Cape Of Good Films and Ashwin Varde Productions and directed by Abhishek Sharma, the film is set to release on 7 November 2014.
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.
