Hindi
Filmmaker Tirlok Malik awarded National AIA Honour Award
NEW DELHI: US based Indian filmmaker Tirlok Malik has been awarded the National AIA Honor Award by Association of Indians in America for his contribution as a filmmaker.
AIA, the oldest national association of Asian Indians in America, was founded in 1967. The association continues to recognise people with exceptional qualities and have organised national honour awards for those excelling in their respective fields of medicine, business, science, technology, art, and others.
This is the first time that the association has honoured a filmmaker. Malik said he was humbled by this award.
The event was attended by many AIA committee members from all over US and also many US Congressman from Chicago.
Malik the founder of the NRI TV Film Club had recently made a Punjabi film, Khushiyaan, starring Kulbhushan Kharbanda and Rama Vij among others.
Malik, who has won several awards including one for his very first film ‘Lonely in America’ in which he had also acted, had been nominated for New York Emmy Award in the category of Historical Programming-Cultural Historical in a Thirteen/WNET segment. His other films include Love Lust and Marriage with Dipti Naval.
“I love making films in New York,” were his opening lines in the segment on Indian filmmaking of which Malik was also the segment producer and has been aired several times on Thirteen/WNET in both- Setting the Stage and the New York Voices programmes.
He has also worked as line producer for many Indian films like Ambedkar, Lajja and Rajnikant’s Sivaji.
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.
