Hindi
Khiladi 786 collects Rs 339 mn in 1st weekend
MUMBAI: Akshay Kumar and Asin starrer Khiladi 786, which had encouraging first show figures, could not sustain well through Friday. The collections improved on Saturday and Sunday for the film to show a reasonable weekend of Rs 339 million. The film is sustaining better at single screens and faces no opposition in the coming week which may help it to some extent.
Aamir Khan’s Talaash ended its first week with figures of Rs 680.6 million, mainly on the strength of multiplexes. The film added another Rs 111 million for the second weekend to take its 10-day total to Rs 791.6 million.
Ang Lee’s Life Of Pi continues to do well at major centres. The film collected Rs 38 million in its second week, thereby taking its tally to Rs 238 million.
Jab Tak Hai Jaan has collected Rs 30.2 million in its third week to total Rs 1.21 billion over 24 days.
Son Of Sardar has netted Rs 36 million in its third week and trails behind Jab Tak Hai Jaan with a box office score of Rs 1.04 billion.
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.
