Hindi
Salman, Shah Rukh among ETC Bollywood Business awards
MUMBAI: Salman Khan and Shah Rukh Khan have bagged ETC Bollywood Business Awards after they were named most profitable actors of the Hindi film industry both in India and abroad.
While Salman‘s film Bodyguard was declared the top grosser, Shah Rukh Khan‘s Ra.One was termed as the best marketed film of the year. The film also bagged an award under the highest single day collection category.
Kareena Kapoor, who featured in Bodyguard and Ra.One respectively last year, was named the most profitable actor in the female category.
“Receiving an award wherein you are being adjudged considering the economic quotient as a cornerstone for mapping the success gives you a sense of pride. I‘ve always maintained that commercial success is as important as the critical success of a movie. A commercially successful movie pays evidence to the fact that viewers loved watching your movie,” Kareena said in a press statement.
Bodyguard‘s director Siddique was named the most profitable director.
Other films like Pyaar Ka Panchnaama, The Dirty Picture, Don 2:The King Is Back and Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol bagged awards for being the most successful small budget Film, ETC Box Office surprise of the year, most popular first look of a film and most successful foreign film respectively.
The ETC Awards will be aired on Monday.
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.
