Hindi
Kamal Haasan, Paresh Rawal and Sooni Taraporewala among Padma Awardees
NEW DELHI: Veteran actor Kamal Hassan and vocal artiste Begum Parveen Sultana have been conferred the Padma Bhushan while actors Paresh Rawal, Vidya Balan, and filmmaker Santosh Sivan have been named for the Padma Shri awards in the Republic Day Honours this year.
Renowned Ghatam artiste T H Vinayakaram has also been named for a Padma Bhushan in the list announced by the President late this evening.
Veteran animation filmmaker Ram Mohan, actors Supriya Devi and Sabitri Chatterji from West Bengal and script writer and director Sooni Taraporewala have also been named for Padma Shri.
Renowned Tabla player Vijay Ghate, Sarangi exponent Ustad Moinuddin Khan of Rajasthan, pauna manjha music artiste Musafir Ram Bhardwaj, wellknown theatre exponent Bansi Kaul of Kashmir, eminent poet Ashok Chakradhar, eminent authors Ruskin Bond and Manorama Jafa are also among the Padma Shri recipients.
The late Justice J S Verma who had headed the News Broadcasting Standards Authority and later the inquiry into the rape of a medical student in December 2012 has been named posthumously for the Padma Shri.
Tennis ace Leader Paes, badminton player Pullela Gopichand, cricketer Yuvraj Singh from Haryana and Anjum Chopra of Delhi, kabaddi star Sunil Dabbas of Haryana, Delhi mountaineering enthusiast Love Raj Singh Dharmshaktu, squash player Dipika Rebecca Pallikal, wheelchair tennis player H Boniface Prabhu of Karnataka, and mountaineer Mamta Sodhna of Haryana figured among the sports persons who received the Padma Shri.
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.
