Hindi
Ormax Media forays into celebrity image consulting
Mumbai: Media consulting firm Ormax Media announced the launch of its new consulting tool Ormax Star Image Pulse. The tool marks the company’s foray into celebrity image consulting. It has been designed to help actors in the film and streaming categories, as well as social media influencers, craft their market positioning based on audience intelligence provided by Ormax Media.
Ormax Star Image Pulse will deploy a mix of primary research (qualitative and quantitative) and data mining of Ormax’s vast repertoire of audience data built over 16 years, to draw out specific insights related to the celebrity’s image among their target audience. Recommendations from an Ormax Star Image Pulse will help a celebrity in various areas of their work, such as project selection, personal branding, and endorsement choices.
Speaking about Ormax Star Image Pulse, Ormax Media founder & CEO Shailesh Kapoor said, “In a world where a celebrity is surrounded by people who are always putting them on a pedestal – fans, followers, media, employees, industry colleagues – objectivity invariably gets compromised. The distance between the celebrity and the audience increases as the celebrity gets more famous and successful. To hear independent, objective voices, from outside this echo chamber, is a pressing need, which Ormax Star Image Pulse has been designed to fulfil, by acting as a bridge between the celebrity and their real audience”.
Each Ormax Star Image Pulse project will be customised to the celebrity in question. At the start of the association, the Ormax team will meet the celebrity to discuss any specific focus areas or questions they are seeking clarity on, and customize the research design and the analytics accordingly.
Elaborating on the value of Ormax Star Image Pulse for celebrities, Kapoor said: “Ormax Star Image Pulse, or SIP, as we like to call it, is a truly objective tool to answer two questions for any celebrity: ‘What do my audience think of me? What do they want from me?’ Ormax SIP is an audience-based ‘systematic investment plan’ that a celebrity can opt for, towards building their own brand value, in all spheres of their professional life, towards greater recognition and financial gains”.
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.
