Hindi
Satish Kaushik buys remaking rights of Tamil film Pithamagan
MUMBAI: Satish Kaushik, who helmed the Salman Khan blockbuster Tere Naam, has bought the copyrights of the Tamil film Pithamagan.
Remarked Kaushik. “I had seen Pithamagan way back in 2003 and was moved by the story, especially the character played by Vikram. For this film, I am going to cast two very strong actors. One of them will be an action hero with innocent looks. But I haven’t narrowed down on any names yet.”
The story of Pithamagan, a movie directed by Bala, revolves around four characters. Chithan (Vikram), orphaned at a young age and devoid of all human contacts, lives on his animal instincts and ekes out a living as a graveyard caretaker. He seems to exhibit behaviour consistent with autism spectrum disorders.
Gomathy (Sangeetha), a petty ganja seller, pities Chithan‘s condition and gets him a job at the ganja fields of the main villain.
Sakthi (Surya Sivakumar), the conman, cons Manju (Laila), a polytechnic student, but does not get away with it. Sakthi meets Chithan in jail and takes pity on him and befriends with him. It is Sakthi’s affection that melts Chithan’s stony heart. Later, Sakthi gets into trouble with an influential narcotics dealer and the story moves slowly into a gory and fitting finale.
Kaushik wants to either cast actor Saif Ali Khan or Hrithik Roshan for the character Vikram played in the Tamil version. “I have to start working on the project, which is going to take some time. Until such time, I really can’t talk about who I would like to cast in the movie,” said Kaushik.
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.
