Hindi
Inkaar fizzles at box office
MUMBAI: Of the three movies released on Friday, the multiplexes had pegged their hopes on Inkaar. Sadly, the Sudhir Mishra-directed movie did not live up to the expectations. The film opened to weak response and failed to improve over the weekend and had Rs 52.5 million to show for its first three days.
The other two releases – Mumbai Mirror and Bandook failed to find audience.
Vishal Bhardwaj‘s Matru Ki Bijla Ka Mandola did not succeed in selling its hackneyed story which built a film around a character artiste leaving little for the lead pair to do. Having opened to a tepid response, it could not improve through its first week run and ended its first week with figures of Rs 313.5 million. The film showed a massive drop over its second weekend and will go down as the first notable flop of 2013.
Paresh Rawal and Rajeev Khandelwal starrer Table No 21 survived week two and added Rs 17.5 million for the week taking its total collection to Rs 112.7 million.
Salman Khan‘s Dabangg 2 collected Rs 27.5 million in its fourth week taking its total to Rs 1.45 billion. The number of screens and the opening week indicated a Rs 1.50 million business but the film may fall short of that mark by few 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.
