Hindi
Screenwriters Association announces winners of Script Lab 2022
Mumbai: Screenwriters Association (SWA) on Thursday announced the top six winners of Script Lab 2022. The winners will get further opportunities to work with eminent industry names, it said.
SWA announced Script Lab 2022 back in September 2021 for feature-length screenplays, both original as well as literary adaptations. It is a unique platform by SWA where emerging screenwriters get an opportunity to be mentored by professionals.
According to a statement, SWA received six hundred and one entries this year. “The top six winners were selected by a panel of filmmakers and mentors – Abhishek Chaubey, Alankrita Shrivastava, Sudip Sharma, Shakun Batra, Smita Singh, and Vikramaditya Motwane,” it said.
The top six winning scripts include “13 Days” by Sindhu Sreenivasa Murthy & Gaurav Krishna, “Kashi Kothi Ka Kul” by Akshay Asthana, “A Dinner at Khan’s” by Syed Shadan, “Meiktila” by Nimish Tanna, “Dev Dikshit” by Sandiip N Patil, and “Kriya Karam” by Nipun Angrish and Gundeep Kaur.
SWA’s event sub-committee chairperson Mitesh Shah said that with the Script Lab SWA aims to connect emerging screenwriters with eminent makers who have successfully navigated the industry with their distinct body of work and help them mentor their first drafts. “It has been a truly humbling experience selecting six scripts out of six hundred entries through a rigorous and transparent selection process. We hope this helps them get a meaningful perspective on their drafts and simultaneously get their foot in the door,” added Shah.
“SWA is happy to announce six sets of writers with Six complete scripts, mentored by six brilliant and acclaimed writers/directors. It’s a sixer. All the way,” said SWA president Robin Bhatt.
Congratulating the winners, SWA general secretary Zaman Habib said, “With our first-ever Script Lab we aim to nurture the new writing talent by providing them an opportunity to meet the writer-directors and get their scripts mentored. SWA also plans to make it bigger in the future and provide these six winners with a platform to pitch their scripts directly to the production houses through our upcoming Pitch Fest.”
Habib further thanked all the six mentors for supporting the initiative.
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.
