Hindi
Hindi cinema’s grandmaster Bhansali gets a new patron
MUMBAI: In a marriage of melody and melodrama, Saregama India has splashed Rs 325 crore on Bhansali Productions, backing one of Hindi cinema’s most lavish auteurs with the kind of cheque that would make even his on-screen maharajas blush.
The deal, announced on December 16th, pairs India’s oldest music label with Sanjay Leela Bhansali, the director who never met a chandelier he didn’t want to film in slow motion. It’s a shrewd play: Saregama secures exclusive rights to all future film music from Bhansali Productions, eliminating the need to duke it out in bidding wars whilst the maestro gets the financial muscle to expand his slate of grandiloquent epics.
For a studio that delivered Rs 304 crore in revenue and Rs 45 crore in profit last year—up from a paltry Rs 5.52 crore in FY24—the timing couldn’t be better. Bhansali Productions is on a roll, with over ten films planned for the next three years, including Love and War, starring Ranbir Kapoor, Alia Bhatt and Vicky Kaushal, and Do Deewane Shehar Mein, a romantic drama featuring Siddhant Chaturvedi and Mrunal Thakur.
Saregama’s initial outlay buys it 9,960 compulsory convertible preference shares, with options to increase its stake to 28 per cent by 2028 and potentially 51 per cent by 2030. The investment, expected to boost earnings per share by FY27, marks a strategic pivot for Saregama, which plans to wind down its own film production over the next two years in favour of such partnerships.
Saregama vice chairperson Avarna Jain called it an alignment with “India’s finest creative minds”. Bhansali, known for films like Padmaavat, Bajirao Mastani and Netflix’s Heeramandi, said the firm has found a partner who understands that “powerful cinema requires time, trust, and deep respect for the process”. Translation: the sets will remain enormous, the costumes extravagant, and the songs suitably stirring.
Kotak Investment Banking advised on the transaction, which brings together content and commerce in a way that’s part pragmatism, part spectacle—much like a Bhansali film itself. If it works, Saregama will have locked in a pipeline of premium music whilst bankrolling Bollywood royalty. If it doesn’t, well, at least the soundtrack will be magnificent.
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.
