Hindi
Nitanshi Goel receives an IMDb STARmeter Award
Mumbai: IMDb (www.imdb.com), the world’s most popular and authoritative source for information on movies, TV shows, and celebrities, presented an IMDb ‘Breakout Star’ STARmeter Award to Laapataa Ladies star Nitanshi Goel. The award recognizes stars who are strong performers on the Popular Indian Celebrities list on the IMDb app. It charts the page views of the more than 250 million monthly visitors to IMDb worldwide and has proven to be a keenly accurate predictor of stars who are about to have a breakthrough career moment. At 16, Goel is the youngest IMDb ‘Breakout Star’ STARmeter Award recipient to-date.
Goel stars in Kiran Rao’s comedy-drama film Laapataa Ladies and Amit Ravindernath Sharma’s biographical sports drama Maidaan. After the former’s streaming release in April, Goel ranked in the top 10 of the Popular Indian Celebrities list thrice, including reaching the top spot last week and the number one spot this week. Laapataa Ladies currently holds the No. 25 spot on the Top Rated Indian Movies list, with an IMDb user rating of 8.5/10. Goel’s earlier credits include M.S. Dhoni: The Untold Story, Thapki Pyar Ki, and Daayan.
“Thank you, IMDb, for honoring me with an IMDb ‘Breakout Star’ STARmeter Award,” said Goel. “It happens to be my first award for Laapataa Ladies, and I just found out that I am also the youngest actor to receive this award. I’m still trying to process that! Thank you for making this truly special.”
View Goel’s award presentation video here. IMDb users can also add web series and movies from Goel’s filmography and other titles to their IMDb Watchlist at www.imdb.com/watchlist.
Previous IMDb ‘Breakout Star’ STARmeter Award recipients include Medha Shankr, Bhuvan Arora, Angira Dhar, Adarsh Gourav, Ashley Park, Natasha Bharadwaj, Ayo Edebiri, and Regé-Jean Page. Learn more about the IMDb STARmeter Awards at www.imdb.com/starmeterawards.
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.
