Hindi
Pooja Bhatt’s Bad lives up to its name
MUMBAI: Filmmaker and actress Pooja Bhatt’s film Bad, currently being shot in Rajasthan, has been facing a lot of trouble coming its way. The film is perhaps living up to its name, with the National Students Union of India (NSUI) activists disrupting the shooting at the central jail on 23 July.
She expressed her anger in a tweet saying, “50-75 ppl (sic) claiming to be from NSUI have barged into Central Jail Udaipur shouting slogans against me threatening to shut down my shoot.”
“If I were alone I would tackle them HEADON! But I happen to have a unit of 100. I am responsible for equipment as well,” says another tweet from the filmmaker.
The protestors, who were demanding that the shooting be shut down, alleged the private security guards of Pooja Bhatt hit them when they were protesting. They gave a complaint to Surajpole police station, which is being examined.
The NSUI leader Deepak Mewada, who led the protest, said they were upset with Bhatt’s behavior with Udaipur superintendent of Police, Hariprasad Sharma, who had allegedly misbehaved with the film’s crew on Saturday (20 July). Sharma denied the charges.
The shooting resumed after the Saturday tiff was resolved by District Magistrate Vikas Bhale, who also reportedly appears in the film. Bhale, on his part, said he wanted the shooting to go on because it was good for tourism in the city.
However, with student body elections scheduled in August, it seems the NSUI had its eyes on its own constituency rather than the crew of the Randeep Hooda starrer film.
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.
