Hindi
Films’ miscalculated releases & no face or value
Four films releasing in one week, all lacking in face value with no star who can pull the audience and worst of all, the wrong period to release, bang on the day the Ganesh Festival started.
Ganesh festival has never been the right time to release a film and expect people to flock to cinema halls. This festival which was celebrated as a public event in Maharashtra mainly with some influence till Surat in Gujarat, and Baroda and Indore both having considerable Maharashtrian population being erstwhile Maratha states and, a part of Karnataka.
Now, the festivities are almost pan India and catching up. Entire Maharashtra celebrates this festival and, now, the celebrations have spread equally across entire Gujarat, MP, Karnataka and heading towards other parts of India.
To add to the miscalculated release, the Ram Rahim court ruling made matters worse as it just about ruled out people in the two states of Haryana and Punjab as well as the parts of Delhi venturing out to watch a movie.
Considering the quantum of punishment to the accused baba, there is little hope of moviegoers stepping out in the affected areas. Then, there are flood situations in parts of East to contend with.
Here is the gory picture:
*A Gentleman, an unlikely title which failed to convey anything what the film was about, backfired. If you don’t have enough imagination to name your film, why go ahead and make one at all? Don’t know who uses this word gentleman anymore!
The film opened badly and remained almost stagnant on day two, Saturday. The film showed a marginal increase on Sunday to end its opening weekend with Rs 113 million.
*Babumoshai Bandookbaaz, an odd title for an all-India audience, again shows lack of imagination. The film goes haywire within minutes after its start. It starts with the Vividh Bharati signature tune playing and Kishore Kumar songs on the air but, soon, shifts to the mobile phone era! Nobody ages in this film and you don’t know where it is all happening.
A total bankruptcy of ideas, the film managed to cross the Rs 10 million on the opening day, nothing changed on day two and day three as the film collected Rs 35 million for its opening weekend.
*The fact that the company with a sound background and pedigree, Yash Raj Films should release its all new star cast, Qaidi Band, during the Ganpati Festival, showed a lack of acumen. The film had nothing going for it anyways so why this hasty release? The fact that the film carried the dreams of many newcomers, it deserved a better exploitation.
The film hovered around Rs 3-million figure over its first weekend and can be called the worst failure from Yash Raj Films who, when they make such economical films, are known to cash in from various sources while also creating a library.
*Sniff is poor as collections remained poor at about Rs 4 million for the first weekend.
*Bareilly Ki Barfi falls short of its target as the poor opening took its toll and the film showed only a marginal improvement over its first weekend even as the collections started diminishing as the new week began. The film ended its first week with Rs 165 million.
*Partition: 1947 (Hindi-Dubbed) meets with a disastrous outcome managing to collect just about Rs 7 million in its opening week.
*Toilet Ek Prem Katha adds a handsome Rs 266 million in its second week taking its two-week tally to Rs 1.2 billion.
*Mubarakan collected Rs 11 million in its fourth week taking its four-week total to Rs 564 million.
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.
