Hindi
Shikha Kapur, Amit Chandra and Prabhat Choudhary announce “The Sourrce”
Mumbai: Shikha Kapur, Amit Chandra and Prabhat Choudhary launch “The Sourrce”, an industry first story library committed to harnessing original storytelling from India. It also collaborates with Ormax Media to offer insights and audience feedback to the development team by curating an appeal score to every story before it makes it to the library.
It endeavours to put a structure to the process of harvesting ideas and concepts for story and screenplay development.
Film director Rajkumar Hirani sources the first story and steps in as chief creative mentor.
“The Sourrce” has cultivated a deeply entrenched, first of its kind network of story scouts across the diverse geography of India, spanning across 21 states. Scouts from Kashmir, North East, Hindi heartland, Punjab, Bengal, Maharashtra and Southern states send stories and ideas to the Sourrce’s development team in Mumbai daily.
From true horror stories to folk tales, to rare human achievement stories and rich mythology, the development team at “The Sourrce” is processing an array of incredible story inputs from across the country daily. “The Sourrce” also has dedicated teams to tap into unexplored narratives in the medical, legal and business world.
With this, Ormax Media will offer an industry-wide subscription for access to its library and will also curate stories specific to development briefs.
Commenting on this partnership, Ormax Media founder and CEO Shailesh Kapoor said, “At Ormax Media, we have been testing scripts for films and series extensively over the last decade. But the association with “The Sourrce” is particularly special because it allows us to contribute to the development process right from the onset, from the insight or the idea to the story and then the screenplay. In a rapidly-evolving industry, the importance of audience insights cannot be undermined, and I’m glad that the leadership team at “The Sourrce” is committed to using audience inputs in their pursuit to develop great content for the Indian theatrical and streaming market.”
Adding to it, filmmaker and chief creative mentor Rajkumar Hirani said: “This is a very powerful idea and something that our industry needs. The content pipeline has just exploded and as an industry we need more and more ideas. “The Sourrce” puts a structure to the process of finding creative ideas. While I wouldn’t be involved in the day to day functioning of the company I would be mentoring and guiding the creative team.”
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.
