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Friday, January 28, 2011

Satyajit Ray : Part 1


It is said that the blood inherits the qualities of the
ancestors… Satyajit Ray was one such man I have known. A versatile
genius, he was and what a personality! Being the son of the master of nonsense
rhyme, Sukumar Ray and the grandson of the father of
the half-tone printing technology, Upendra Kishore Roy Chowdhury, Ray may had inherited the merit, the talent
which he in his later life expressed with any of the forms of art he was
involved with. Like the concept of Philosopher’s
Stone
( Bengaliparash pathar), what ever

he touched turned out to be pure gold.. Be in drawings, cinema, fiction, music,anything.. He was a master
of creativity.


Ray was born in 1921 in Garpar
Road in a house, which was built by his grandfather and it was also a printing
press for many books written by Upendra Kishore and a
magazine for children called “Sandesh”, which was edited
by him. Ray, since his childhood was interested in that and many a times, used
to scribble gibberish in a piece of paper and used to go to the man at the
press and said in a bold voice,”it has to be
published in the next issue of Sandesh ( Eta ebarer Sandesh e berobe)”..


From his memoirs of childhood, “Jokhon Choto Chilam( When I was a child ).. I got to know about his childhood,
the Ray family, the Kolkata in the early 20th Century and many
things.


Since my childhood is have been reading his books and
watching his movies.. Even as a child of 21st

century, in the age of animations and special effects, I found those amuzing and thoughtful..


At the age of 12 perhaps, I first saw the movie “Nayak( The Hero ) which I hardly understood. As I grew
up, in different phases of my teenage and manhood, I interpreted it in
different ways and I still do.. unknowingly

it became one of my all-time favorites and the most favorite movie by Ray..


Pather Panchali (The
Song of the Little Road) was a new experience for me when I was around 14
perhaps. I am thankful to the almighty to have been born in a family where I got
to be imbibed
with so rich culture ( the word rich isn’t related to money). I got to read so many books in my childhood
and so many movies to watch, that it made me what I am today..

( though I don’t know what exactly I am)..


One after another, I went on watching movies by Ray, which
ever came in my hand and were amused each time and never did the quality of
this movies, the concept, the script, the technique with which he handled themand especially the music..


Music was one such thing that reminds me… I was a Ray-maniac.. It makes me laugh but while I was 8 or 9, my father
bought me a cassette of the songs of the two “Gupi-Bagha
movies and I remember to play them in a Walkman, and used to sing the songs
with the playback and used my fingers to keep the beats on the plastic cassette
covers..


I excavated a 2 cassette collection of Ray’s compositions, “Music
of Satyajit Ray”.. actually I found out the first cassette but the second was missing..
I started listening to those, and inspite of not
having watched any of the movies except one ( Goopy gyne Bagha Byne)
of them, I listened to them like a maniac.. (I am glad to be one), over and
over and over again.. I forced my father to buy the collection
again so that I could get the second volume of it, and later at an elder age, I
bought the digitally mastered disc and it is something I often play and listen.. The tracks which I have, perhaps, listened a thousand times
seems fresh to me.. I get mesmerized at the feelings,
the moods which are impacted upon my mind by those few instruments, a mixture
of eastern and western.. Indeed in the field of music,
Ray has his own niche..


I constantly read as many biographical books related to Ray
and after a lot of reading, his life is like a clear picture to me.. I was born just months before he died, but his life is
fresh in my imaginations..


The years he spent as a commercial artist, how he married
his love of childhood, his own cousin, who was four years elder to him, how mad
he was about movies since his youth and so many things!! While he was in
London, he watched about 300 movies and was influenced greatly by Hollywood and
its techniques.. Vittorio De Sica’s
“The Bicycle Thief” was one such movie which influenced him. He was mesmerized by
the neo-realistic genre and how De Sica had the movie
made with mostly non-professional actors but with great perfection.. Ray decided to give his own movie which slowly he was
conceiving in his mind, the same treatment. After he returned he decided to
shoot for “Aam Atir Bhepu”, a childrens version
of the book “Pather Panchali” by

Bibhuti Bhusan Bandyopadhyay, which he got to read while drawing its
cover page and pictures for the Signet Press. He chose his friend from The
Calcutta Film Society, Subrata Mitra to be
the cinematographer of the movie and chose to direct himself..
With mere luck and God’s blessings, inspite of having
hard times, he could finish the film and then, there was no looking back.. Let me share another fact, that Ravi Shankar, the wizard
of Sitar composed it’s background score and recorded
them at the same time, nonstop, at a stretch in 11 hours, to meet the dead
lines of a foreign film festival.


There are so many things, so many, to tell about him… which I
will in due course.. I end this post here and promise
to write more on Ray soon…


 


To be continued…






1 comment:

tiyas das said...

great!!!!!!!!! many unbknown facts about the maharaja of films.....wud love to know more...do write