Hindi
Golden Kela awards to be preceded by comedy festival
NEW DELHI: The fourth annual Golden Kela Awards to be held to honour the worst in Bollywood will be preceded this year by a two-day festival of comedy and fun.
Iconic comedy films like ‘Jaane bhi do yaaro‘, ‘Andaz Apna Apna‘ and ‘Tere Bin Laden‘ will be screened on 31 March and 1 April and the event will include a Standup Comedy show by Papa CJ and Sanjay Rajoura.
There will be a play on Ghalib by Pierrot’s Troupe which has been running to full houses for several years.
There will also be a ‘Haasya Kavi Sammelan’ (a comic poetry festival) featuring the renowned Surendra Sharma..
There will also be a competition on Standup Comedy as part of the Indian Comedy Festival. On 1 April, the three finalists will meet and compete for the top prize of Rs 1,00,000 along with the chance to be featured on Comedy Central, according to Jatin Varma, Organiser, Indian Comedy Festival and head of Twenty Onwards Media.
There will also be a competition of India’s funniest videos, and these could win a Grand Cash Prize of Rs 1999.
Last year the ceremony was hosted by Cyrus Broacha, and this year the ceremony will also feature the winner of the Short Video Contest, and will feature a very special guest – B-Movie Filmmaker Extraordinaire Kanti Shah!
Kanti Shah is a director and producer of B grade Hindi movies. Best known for the cult film ‘Gunda’ in 1998 (Starring Mithun Da!) and such classics as Loha, Duplicate Sholay, Shaadi Basanti ki Honeymoon Gabbar ka, and Sheela Ki Jawani. Kanti Shah is perhaps the only Director worthy of the title ‘So Bad It’s Good’.
The Golden Kela Awards ceremony will take place on 1 April at Ficci Auditorium. The Golden Kela Awards, the Indian version of Razzies – “Golden Raspberry Awards” which are very popular awards in the West for awarding the worst in the film making industry – will be awarding the worst of Bollywood in the year 2011. Voting is already on at www.goldenkela.com and closes on 31st March’ 2012.
The Comedy Fest will also have several stalls by some of the most fun merchandisers, t-shirt companies, publishers, toy makers etc. Also, there will be Open Mic – Musical acts, amateur standup comedy, juggling and puppets.
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.
