Hindi
Remake of Chhoti Si Baat on cards
MUMBAI: David Dhawan is planning a remake of Basu Chatterji’s 1975 made rom-com Choti Si Baat.
Choti Si Baat is about a painfully shy young man Arun Pradeep (Amol Palekar), who lacks self-confidence and fails to stand up for his convictions; he is in the process making a mockery of himself. One fine day he comes across Prabha Narayan (Vidya Sinha) at the bus stop en route to work and it‘s love at first sight.. Lacking enough courage and unsure if his feelings are being reciprocated, he pines for her from afar and follows her around from a safe distance. Prabha, fully aware of his affections, secretly relishes his discomfort, while waiting for him to make the first move.
In his desperation, Pradeep finally turns to Colonel Julius Nagendranath Wilfred Singh (Ashok Kumar) who agrees to help him and, thus, begins the turnaround as Singh begins to mould Arun into a mature, confident young man.
It is being said that Dhawan is in plans to cast Anil Kapoor and Ali Zafar in stellar roles. The film will have Zafar play the role of the shy introvert who takes the help of Kapoor to win over his lady love.
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.
