Hindi
Kahaani maker Sujoy Ghosh rubbishes talks of plagirism
MUMBAI: Sujoy Ghosh has trashed stories about his film Kahaani’s climax bearing a striking resemblance with that of the Angelina Jolie-starrer Taking Lives.
The ending of Taking Lives shows a heavily pregnant Jolie sitting alone in her house when she discovers a serial killer. She tries to escape but is overpowered by him and is punched and thrown to the ground. During the altercation, the serial killer begins to choke her and eventually stabs her in her pregnant belly with a pair of scissors.
Jolie, seemingly unharmed by the stabbing, shocks him by quickly stabbing him with the same pair of scissors. As the killer lies dying, Jolie removes a prosthetic pregnant belly, and says the past seven months have been a planned trap.
In Kahaani, the protagonist Vidya Bagchi too is heavily pregnant and in search of a man who looks like her husband Arnab Bagchi. The lady also gets into a similar act by killing the person, not with a pair of scissors, but with her hairpin.
Said Ghosh, “Since I started making Kahaani, people spoke about so many sources that it has been copied from. In this country, where people don‘t know about Satyajit Ray, Yash Chopra and Manmohan Desai, it‘s amazing to note people are aware of films made in distant land seven years ago in 2004,” adding, “ does this mean two lookalike people from different parts of the world have the same root.”
According to Ghosh, his portrayal of Vidya Bagchi was to get to the fore the prowess of Maa Durga killing the evil. “Did Jolie also play Maa Durga or was she possessed by the goddess?” Ghosh questions.
While the Jolie film received mostly poor reviews, Ghosh’s Kahaani has turned out to be a runaway hit.
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.
