Hindi
Prasad Lolayekar takes over as CEO of Entertainment Society of Goa
NEW DELHI: Prasad V. Lolayekar, Director for Art and Culture in the Goa Government and Officer on Special Duty to the Chief Minister, has been given additional charge as Chief Executive Officer of the Entertainment Society of Goa.
This follows the resignation of Manoj Srivastava, who was Deputy Director in the Directorate of Film Festivals of the Information and Broadcasting Ministry. Earlier, Srivastava had been a producer with Doordarshan.
During his tenure from June 2008 to 31 December 2012, Srivastava managed the International Film Festival of India on behalf of the Goa Government, since the ESG had been established for collaborating with the DFF after Panaji became a permanent venue for the IFFI in 2004.
During his tenure, Srivastava introduced short films to IFFI by launching the Short Film Center in 2008, giving a fillip to short film movement.
Ever since, the short film movement began in India. During his tenure, Goa bagged the Best Film Destination Award last year.
From a state having five films shot each year, Goa last year boasted of shooting 79 films. Sources said the non-existent film business in Goa has shot up to an industry of Rs four billion.
The attendance at the IFFI has risen from a paltry 3,700 in 2008 to over 13,000 in 2012.
During Srivastava’s tenure, the first Digital Film Archive in Asia was set up in ESG, apart from Goa Cinephile, a famous Film Club for Goans and development of film culture in Goa.
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.
