Search Website mirrors making of Satyajit Ray’s Goopi Gyne Bagha Byne The site is presenting the ‘kheror khata’ in which the director kept detailed notes covering all aspects of the film, from costume sketches to musical notes and dialogues
Between the covers of two traditional red cloth-bound notebooks is enclosed the creative process that resulted in one of Satyajit Ray’s landmark films,
Goopi Gyne Bagha Byne.
In Ray’s centenary year, a bilingual website, exploreray.org, is presenting the
kheror khata in which he kept detailed notes covering all aspects of the film, from costume sketches to musical notes and dialogues. “The first khata has 733 pages of the story line, sketches of the characters and elements of the sets, the shooting script and the story board, all of which he developed over time. The second book has about 200 pages on the dance of the ghosts and post-
“It is very suffocating. I just lowered my mask to breathe properly for a while,” said a young man who had his mask literally hanging from his chin.
At another polling booth at a school in Rifle Range, social distancing in the queue seemed like an alien concept.
Things were no different at the booth inside Patha Bhavan school in Ballygunge. After this newspaper started taking pictures, the jawans guarding the booth took it upon themselves to prod people to stand apart from each other.
At a polling station inside a girls’ school on Sarat Bose Road, voter after voter was discarding the gloves on the road outside the booth, though yellow bins had been kept on the booth premises to dispose of the gloves.
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.”