Hindi
Deepika Padukone voted in as the Number 1 Bollywood heroine
MUMBAI: It serves as evidence that Deepika Padukone has stolen the hearts of countless Bollywood fans across the nation, as she got voted for the top spot on India Today’s Mood of the Nation: Bollywood’s Heroine No. 1 Poll.
India Today holds the Mood of the Nation Poll, a comprehensive annual poll to gauge mass opinion on a variety of topics. The poll is conducted online on topics ranging from politics, sports and entertainment. In the ‘Bollywood’s Number 1 Heroine’ category, Katrina Kaif and Kareena Kapoor earned 10% vote each to come in after Deepika Padukone, who received 13%. Sonakshi Sinha and Priyanka Chopra secured 9% and 6% votes respectively.
Deepika Padukone received rave reviews for her very first performance in Om Shanti Om in 2007. She won 4 Best Female Debut Awards and was even nominated as Best Actress for the same. Delivering hits after hits with ‘Cocktail’, ‘Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani’, ‘Ram Leela’ and ‘Chennai Express’, she has won several esteemed awards for her performances in her acting career of 8 years.
Deepika Padukone also leads the way on social media with the most number of followers on social networking websites Facebook and Twitter as compared to the rest of the film industry. Humbled by the massive fanfare, Deepika even engaged in a live chat with her fans on Facebook to celebrate hitting 15 million followers. The graceful actress is also among the few Bollywood personalities who have an account on photo-sharing website Instagram.
Apart from wowing audiences with her skill as an impeccable actress, Deepika Padukone has also turned heads as a style diva, having received awards for her wonderful fashion sense. Practically every look she has donned has worked for the ever graceful Deepika Padukone. She was also voted as the sexiest woman in the world in a poll conducted by FHM Magazine in July this year.
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.
