Kolkata: The timing could not have been better when Prakash Javadekar, the Union Information and Broadcasting Minister, announced at a meet-and-greet session with the Who’s Who of Bengali film industry on Monday that a national level film award would be instituted in the name of the iconic director Satyajit Ray.
While no further details on the award were available, it is believed that it would be somewhat in the lines of the Dada Saheb Phalke award - hitherto considered as the highest honour in Indian cinema. This being the birth centenary year of Ray, the Oscar-winning director who is considered to be Bengal’s biggest cultural icon after the Nobel laureate bard Rabindranath Tagore, there are no prizes for guessing that the mileage in bestowing this honour on him on the threshold of the West Bengal elections is too lucrative to let go.