Hindi
YRF going South to remake Band Baaja Baarat and Bunty aur Bubly
MUMBAI: Yash Raj Films (YRF), which had floated a South Indian division to remake its own hits into South Indian languages, is toying with the idea of remaking Band Baaja Baarat in Telugu, Tamil and Kannada with fresh faces in the lead.
This will be followed by the Abhishek Bachchan-Rani Mukherjee starrer Bunty aur Babli.
Confirming this, a YRF spokesperson said “We are seriously looking at remaking Band Baaja Baaraat in the South.” Band Baaja Baaraat starred Ranveer Singh and Anoushka Sharma and was well received, especially among younger audiences.”
Since this film had made a mark at the box office, many filmmakers from the south had approached the production house to buy the rights of the film. However, YRF has never sold the making rights of any of their films.
Ever since Bodyguard, Ready and Singham came on the scene, trade is abuzz with talk that films from South India being remade in Hindi is the order of the day. But few know that several South Indian films are based on Hindi films.
When Aditya Chopra realised the huge potential of the South Indian market, he set up YRF Deccan and appointed Padam Kumar as the head since he is a known producer in the south and understands the market well.
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.
