How Samik Bandyopadhyay built a collection of 40,000 books that he’s donating to create a library
‘There are the books and my bed. That’s it.’ Samik Bandyopadhyay. | Anchita Ghatak
Samik Bandyopadhyay, teacher, publisher, writer, translator, and commentator on art, theatre, literature and politics, and of course, an avid reader, has recently donated his immense collection of more than 40,000 books to Boi Baibhav Foundation to create a library that will be a repository of much literary and cultural heritage. Scroll met the octogenarian Bandyopadhyay at his temporary lodgings in Lake Gardens in Kolkata, where he was recuperating after surgery. Excerpts from the interview:
100 Years of Satyajit Ray: a tribute to The Apu Trilogy
May 2, 2021, saw the start of celebrations of the 100th birthday of the great Bengali filmmaker,
Satyajit Ray. Ray’s films were probably amongst the earliest Indian films I’d seen, long before Bollywood would grab my attention. I love many of Ray’s films:
Devi from 1960 (starring the sublime Sharmila Tagore) is a particular favourite, and is a commentary on religious devotion and fundamentalism, and, particular, on a system that both places women on pedestals as goddesses even as it removes their agency and represses them.
Charulata (apparently the film Ray himself cited as his own favourite of all his films) is an exercise in subtle storytelling and gave us the irrepressible Amal, played by Soumitra Chatterjee, who literally stole my heart in so many films. But no Ray film touches my heart so completely as do the three films in the
Satyajit Ray Birth Anniversary: The Director Built the factory of actors in the Bengali film industry of that time dgtl anandabazar.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from anandabazar.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Nayak in 1966.
Through the 1970s and 1980s, Mitra conducted regular workshops at the Film and Television Institute in India. Just like Ritwik Ghatak had fired the minds of direction students in a previous generation, Mitra laid open the secrets of the camera for a new breed of technicians. They included Virendra Saini, Anil Mehta, KU Mohanan, Dilip Varma, Sunny Joseph and Anoop Jotwani, who would go on to become eminent cinematographers in their own right.
“He was like an Impressionist painter who would concentrate on different tones on the face,” Virendra Saini said. “The background was as important as the foreground.”