| Ray's Views |
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Cosmic Mystery
“… The fact that both the Sun and the Moon seem to be of the same size – this is an awesome coincidence and it is a probability of one in a billion billion billion coming true !”
( Interview with Aparna Sen, published in Decade, a special supplement of the Economic Times, June 9, 1986 ) |
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God
“Often I think that if God really exists, and is almighty, he could create mankind at his sweet will in the twinkling of an eye just at the beginning. Why then was the long process necessary? It pains me to see that old human values are being irretrievably lost and that faith in goodness and honesty is being wrecked. If God is good, why is there so much evil and suffering around ?”
( From an interview in The Statesman,
June 22, 1991 ) |
The Inexplicable
“I can't refute that a power, unseen and inexplicable, sometimes controls or guides the course of human lives. Quite miraculous events have occurred in the lives of my grandfather and father. My father had a clear premonition that he would die very soon. This premonitory sense came to him even before his illness, and he expressed it in a letter to Prasanta Mahalanobis. He felt as if he had lost his sense. That seemed to him to be the sign of approaching death. He wrote the word ‘death' in English in Bengali letter, and it was underlined.… How can we explain this incident? ...”
( Interview in The Statesman, June 22, 1991 ) |
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Loneliness
“… The one thing I am very much interested in is a loner – one person. Quite often in my stories you will see just one person ; he hasn't married, he doesn't have any children, he lives with his own preoccupations … I have personally realised what loneliness is during most of my life. … And often I feel, if I were asked ‘Who is your friend?' I would not be able to name anyone … I am quite alone. Quite alone and I have become used to it. At no time have I regretted the fact that I am alone, or that I lack friends.…”
( Interview with Aparna Sen, published in Decade, a special supplement of the Economic Times, Kolkata, June 9, 1986 ) |
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| Rabindranath Tagore |
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The Unknown India
“A vast sub-continent with one of the oldest and richest traditions of art, music and literature, existed only to be ignored. That this apathy should apply as much to Britain, which once ruled India, as to any other western country is astonishing, but true. The fact is, the Colonised have, willy-nilly, developed considerable interest in the Colonisers, never the other way round. …Slighted for so long, India will not yield up her secretes to the west so easily…”
( Sight & Sound, Autumn, 1982 )
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Tagore
“On August 7, in 1941, in Calcutta, a man died. His mortal remains perished, but he left behind him a heritage which no fire could consume. It was a heritage of words and music and poetry, of ideas and of ideals and it has the power to move us today and in the days to come. We, who owe him so much, salute his memory. …”
( Satyajit Ray's Narration for his documentary, Rabindranath Tagore ) |
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| Vast open spaces, dustless sky near Tagore's University |
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Santiniketan, Tagore's University
“Santiniketan was a world of vast open spaces, vaulted over with dustless sky, that on a clear night showed the constellations as no city sky could ever do. The same sky, on a clear day, could summon up in moments an awesome invation of belowing darkness that seemed to engulf the entire universe. …”
( Amal Bhattacharya Memorial Lecture delivered in September 1982 ) |
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Nandalal Bose, The Art teacher
Shantiniketan taught me two things - to look at paintings, and to look at nature. We used to go out in the afternoon to sketch from nature.
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| Art of Nandalal Bose |
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Nandalal Bose
Portrait - Satyajit Ray |
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Nandalal Bose, our Mastermoshai, would steal up from behind, peer over the shoulder and say : " That's a good outline of a cow. But a cow is more than an outline. You must feel the form of the animal - the flesh and bones beneath the skin, and this feeling must show in the way your pencil moves. "
( Amal Bhattacharya Memorial Lecture delivered in September 1982 ) |
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Bibhutibhusan, author of Apu Trilogy and
Distant Thunder
“The true basis of the film style of ‘Pather Panchali' is not Neorealist or any other school of cinema or even any individual works of cinema, but the novel of Bibhutibhusan itself.”
( Amrita Bazar Patrika, 1957 ) |
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| Bibhutibhusan Banerjee |
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