Hindi
I&B Ministry seeks to placate irate film fraternity over IFFI
NEW DELHI: The Information and Broadcasting Ministry has assured the film fraternity that it had never intended to keep out representatives from the organisation of the International Film Festival of India.
I&B Joint Secretary (Films) Raghavendra Singh told a delegation of the Film Federation of India that the he would examine their grievances but requested them to cooperate with the organisation of the Festival, being held in November in Panaji, Goa.
Singh, an Indian Administrative Service officer of the 1983 batch from the West Bengal cadre, said he had been in the Ministry for just a few weeks and would study their issues.
The FFI was represented by its President Vinod Lamba, Secretary General Supran Sen, and Vice-Presidents L Suresh and Ravi Kottarakara, Rajendra Singh from Delhi, and Ramesh Tekwani from Mumbai among others.
The move comes just over a week after the FFI, the apex body of the film industry, decided to boycott all activities of the IFFI to protest its being by-passed and not being called to any meeting of the Steering and other Committees.
The members present told Raghavendra Singh that they were told of the Industry Coordination Committee meeting as late as August-end by which time some major discussions that are normally taken at this meeting had already been taken by the Directorate of Film Festivals and IFFI Secretariat.
The Federation in its Annual General Meeting earlier this month in Mumbai unanimously decided that FFI will not participate in any of the activities of IFFI.
FFI has always been an essential component of the Steering Committee and its members actively involved in various other committees and sub-committees such as Theatre, Technical, Hospitality and others. But this has not happened in recent years and ‘FFI can only assume that either the committees have been discontinued or FFI has been kept out of them.’
The IFFI by its very tenets is a festival held jointly by the Government and the Indian Film Industry, and the Film Federation of India being the apex body of the industry ‘has been playing their part with total sincerity and efficiency.’
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.
