Hindi
Shoojit Sircar’s next is Jaffna for John Abraham
MUMBAI: Fresh from the success of Vicky Donor, Shoojit Sircar has jumped into his next film Jaffna produced by John Abraham. The two had earlier teamed up for Vicky Donor which has totally collected Rs 412.5 million.
A dark political thriller, Jaffna is based on the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and the civil war in the Sri Lankan city.
Elaborating on the film, Sircar explained, “It would not dilute the LTTE issue. There is no point in taking up a theme and not going all the way. It would be as self-defeating as doing my film on sperm donation (Vicky Donor) without any mentions of sperms or sex.”
Talking about the casting, Sircar averred, “Right now, we have John in the film. The film will be a dark political thriller with Abraham playing an Indian intelligence agent.”
Shooing away wild guesses that he has signed Prosenjit to play Rajiv Gandhi in his next political thriller director, Shoojit Sircar has scoffed at such reports. “There is no character of Rajiv Gandhi in the film that I am writing. We are still in the scripting stage. It is a piece of fiction,” Sircar observed.
“I am in talks with Prosenjit and trying to work out on the kind of character he will essay. As of now there are two things in my mind for Prosenjit – either a simple, normal citizen of India or that of a police officer or someone else. But nothing is finalised yet,” he added.
The director also said that his film would have all the known political personalities from the LTTE episode of Indian history including Prabhakaran, the LTTE’s founder. “We’re casting look-alikes for all the known political personalities including Prabhakaran.”
Meanwhile, Sircar has finished directing a docu-feature campaign titled She Can, You Can for brand Tupperware as his first campaign.
Though he had earlier done films and ad films, this campaign was very special to him because it was about ‘Real Heroes’ and this ‘big idea’ about Woman Empowerment and women as a catalyst for change in society and development of nhe Nation.
Tupperware India’s ‘She Can, You Can’ is a campaign that celebrates role models of real life heroes than can be emulated and be an engine of change in India.
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.
