Hindi
Shahid, Sonakshi entertain viewers at R Rajkumars music launch
MUMBAI: The music launch of the movie R…Rajkumar in the city recently turned out to be a high energy affair. The director and actors broke in to a jig as soon as the music from the film started playing. So while it was Prabhu Deva, the director of the film and Shahid Kapoor, the lead actor, who started the high-octane performance, Sonakshi too joined in as soon as the chart-bursting Sari Ke Fall Se… started.
Sonkashi, who looked pretty in a black sari with fushia and florescent border, seemed to share a really comfortable bond with Shahid. The two actors not just shared few interesting anecdotes from the shoot but also enacted a few scenes.
At one point, Shahid jokingly even remarked that Sonakshi “ko thappad se toh darr lagta nahi..” referring to her now famous dialogue from Dabangg. However, he was talking about a new term “thappi” that they have coined in the film. “The word is a combination of thappad and pappi and has been used in the film,” he shared, as the two even gave the audience a live demo of a thappi.
While at the launch, the magic of the two lead actors worked really well, let’s see if the pairing even works on-screen!
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.
