Hindi
Shirin Farhad Ki Toh Nikal Padi: Another failed attempt at being ‘different’
Mumbai: The quest for something different, something that can be made in a limited budget and without big stars continues. As such, Shirin Farhad Ki Toh Nikal Padi is an experiment to that end.
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Producers: Sanjay Leela Bhansali, Sunil Lulla. |
The casting of Boman Irani and Farah Khan, as well as Bela Bhansali Sehgal directing a film for her brother’s banner, gets the film ample media attention. Parsis are known for marrying late or not marrying at all and that forms the basis of this film.
Farhad (played by Boman Irani) is a 45-year-old bachelor with a dominating mother and loving grandmother. He makes his living working as a salesman at a local lingerie shop. Shirin (Farah Khan) is a single Parsi woman of 40 years. One fine day she walks into the shop where Boman works to buy a bra. She is specific about what she wants and Boman tries to convince her on a different size putting his years of experience to use. The sparks fly and both are drawn to each other. Boman, a pure heart simpleton, and Farah, an aggressive kind, want to meet again and again.
Unknown to both of them, Farah is already enemy of the state as far as Boman’s mother, Daisy Irani, is concerned. As the secretary of the Parsi Trust, she has been responsible for destroying an illegal water storage tank which Daisy Irani’s late husband had lovingly built! Her late husband had done only two worthy things in his life: build that water tank and gave her a son like Boman. So there is no way Farah Khan can be her daughter-in-law. This apart, Boman and Farah keep having their own lovers’ tiffs and misunderstandings too.
As the film makes it to its post interval part, it shreds any notion of being the love story of a middle-aged couple; it tries to incorporate everything that a regular teenage love story would have. The film’s backdrop is the famous Khushrow Baug in South Mumbai and almost all Parsis are made out to be nutty characters and their trust meetings are usually a free for all. What is more, the film concentrates only on the Parsi community with no non-Parsi character around.
There are few characters in the film except when there is a meeting that turns into a free for all, which is made to look inevitable at each gathering. The film rests on the shoulders of Boman, Farha, Daisy Irani and Shammi. Shammi and Daisy Irani still make their presence felt. Boman Irani is his usual self, very natural. Farah carries a smirk all the time as if she was enjoying the experience.
Directorially, Bela Bhansali Sehgal makes her debut but looks like she has a long way to go; the script is patchy and there is little she can do to rise above it. Dialogue is routine. Music wise, songs are well tuned but are out of place in most cases.
Shirin Farhad Ki Toh Nikal Padi promises no box office prospects.
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.
