Hindi
Ram-Leela to sell offline apps at retail stores
MUMBAI: After Shotformat’s recently launched offline app store – Biscoot Aap Bazaar, Ram-Leela has become the first movie in the country to sell apps at the retail stores (Biscoot retail stores).
Biscoot Aap Bazaar stocks movies, music, apps and games that will now be available at retail stores across India.
Through Shotformats, one can watch Ram-Leela’s songs, video clips and the full-length movie right to consumers’ mobile screens through retails stores. Not only this, forthcoming films like R Rajkumar and Bullet Raja will also soon reach the 400 Biscoot retail outlets across Mumbai and 10, 000 retail outlets across India in a very short span after their launch.
Through this offline app store, people can access games, apps, music and latest legal, HD quality and superior sound movies in just a few weeks of the release for dirt cheap prices between Rs 5 to Rs 30. The Biscoot stores are a chain of already existing retail stores selling mobile recharge, accessories etc. The stores will also soon make available digital music cassettes of movies for mobile on the day of the music release. This new distribution chain of entertainment content will also add an additional revenue stream for the entertainment industry.
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.
