Hindi
Wrestler and Bollywood star Dara Singh loses battle against death
MUMBAI: Dara Singh (Raja Azaad Singh), who etched the four letter word ‘MARD‘ on the chest of his son Raju (Amitabh Bachchan) in the Manmohan Desai-directed film Mard, is no more. The Rustam-e-Hind, who never lost a fight in the ring, lost a protracted battle against death this morning.
He died at his house where he was shifted from the Kokilaben Dhirubhai Ambani Hospital. The wrestler-turned actor had been undergoing dialysis at the hospital.
“Angel now gone to shine like a star up above,” the actor‘s son Vindu Dara Singh texted after his father‘s death.
The wrestler started his film career way back in 1967 with the film Saat Samunder and ended with Jab We Met in 2007.
Singh has also been the owner of prestigious Dara Film Studio at Mohali, Punjab that he founded in 1978. The studio, operational from 1980, is a self-contained mini-city with every facility within the compound.
It is a fully a equipped studio with camera, camera equipment, Nagra lights and all type of extra equipment like stands, trolleys, cables for filming movies, serials and pop albums throughout North India.
Singh is survived by his wife and six children – three sons and three daughters.
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.
