Hindi
Kamal Hassan back to Bollywood with Amar Hain
MUMBAI: Kamal Hassan is returning to the Hindi screen after a gap of 12 long years. The actor-producer-director is set to enter the arena with a separate Hindi version of his big-budgeted Tamil film.
According to Hassan, he wrote the script two years ago but put it aside because it required great intellectual and financial inputs. “I think I am now ready on both counts,” he is quoted to have said.
Titled Amar Hain, the film will take a dispassionate look at the legitimisation of corruption in present-day India. Though the film isn‘t judgmental about corruption, it looks at contemporary mores dispassionately.
The other angle is the invisibility of global crime lords in the era of technology. “In the digital era, everything including crime is on the computer and the phone. That‘s why we never see global players in the crime game in our country. They don‘t need to since all their work is digitally manouevred. Amar Hain goes into all of this,” Hassan added.
The film will be made in Tamil and Hindi with Hassan himself helming the project, besides playing the lead in both the versions.
The last film Hasan produced, directed and acted was Hey Ram in 2000.
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.
