Hindi
Box Office: ‘Singh Is Bliing’ collects Rs 44.4 crore in opening weekend
MUMBAI: Singh Is Bliing, an action comedy, gets Akshay Kumar his biggest opening day yet as Friday being a major all India holiday for Gandhi Jayanti. However, the clean sweep on Friday cost the film’s Saturday footfalls as the collections dropped by about 30 per cent. With Sunday being better, the film ended its opening weekend with Rs 44.4 crore.
Talvar earned much appreciation and positive press and despite getting odd show timings, managed a decent paid preview and Friday response. The film, in fact added to its collections on Saturday by word of mouth. With a decent Sunday to add to its kitty, the film collected Rs 9.2 crore in its first weekend.
Kapil Sharma’s Kis Kisko Pyar Karu was director duo Abbas Mustan’s foray into comedy genre. The film maintained very well through rest of the week after an impressive weekend. It collected Rs 38.1 crore in its first week.
Calendar Girls, Madhur Bhandarkar’s personal formula film, mainly about scandalous content and counting on exploiting woman anatomy, falls flat on its face. The film is slated to have cost four times it should have and promises to be a major loser. After a poor opening weekend of Rs 3.8 crore, it had even poorer run through rest of the week adding a meagre Rs 1.3 crore for the first week tally of Rs 5.1 crore.
Bhaag Johnny manages a poor Rs 1.9 crore for its first week. Time Out’s collections are very poor, whereas Katti Batti collects Rs 1.95 crore in its second week taking its two week tally to Rs 23.45 crore.
Welcome Back added Rs 40 lakh in its fourth week to take its four week total to Rs 94.3 crore.
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.
