Hindi
‘Piku’ peaks at box office; earns Rs 25.22 crore
MUMBAI: The Amitabh Bachchan, Deepika Padukone and Irrfan Khan starrer Piku might have started slow at the box office on Friday but interest was piqued amongst movie goers as it earned positive word of mouth. Piku managed to gain patrons during later shows on Friday. The movie’s wheels picked up additional “motion” on Saturday and Sunday.
The film improved by leaps and bounds with Rs 5.32 crore collections on Friday, Rs 8.7 crore on Saturday and Rs 11.2 crore on Sunday to take its opening weekend figure to Rs 25.22 crore.
Kuch Kuch Locha Hai proves a dud with no takers. Expecting Ram Kapoor and Sunny Leone to sell high priced tickets came as a cropper. The audience can’t be taken for granted with half-baked ideas. The film managed to collect just about Rs 2.4 crore in its first weekend.
Sabki Bajegi Band manages a meager Rs 20 lakh in its first week. Proves a disaster.
Gabbar Is Back backfires. The film is the worst among recent Akshay Kumar releases and the idea to cash in on famous Gabbar character from Sholay and its brand equity fails. The film stays afloat thanks to a four day weekend due to holidays collecting Rs 36.6 crore in its first four days but drops thereafter ending its first week with a total of Rs 56.4 crore.
Margarita With A Straw collects Rs 55 lakh in its third week to take its two week tally to Rs 5.8 crore.
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.
