Book excerpt: Satyajit Ray: An Intimate Master is an invaluable sourcework for studies in the work of Satyajit Ray and offers fascinating reading at the same time. Specially commissioned articles by experts and some of Ray's closest associates, relations and friends provide insights into the entire range of the creativity of Satyajit Ray, one of the world's greatest filmmakers—as artist and designer, writer, and filmmaker—and the environment that nurtured him. The contributions unravel features never before touched—upon all those subterranean elements that went into the making of his films and his artistic character. They should serve to open up new approaches to and possibilities for fresh readings of Ray's works in fiction, design and filmmaking alike. The 400-odd illustrations—several of them appearing in print for the first time—bring together a wide range of film stills, working stills, book illustrations, early drawings and sketches, layouts for advertisement insertions, film posters, brochures, portraits, caricatures, jacket designs, giving viewers a rare chance of studying the entirety of Ray's visual imagination and artistic craftsmanship. The memoiral, and analytical and critical pieces are supplemented by a comprehensive and thoroughly authenticated documentation, covering Ray's biography, a chronology of his films, filmography, synopses and cast/credits, awards and honours, his contributions to works by others, discography, bibliography, citations received on several occasions, the text of his earliest literary work, reproductions of his earliest artistic works, and portfolios on the making of Pather Panchali, his masterwork, and his involvement with Sandesh, the popular children's periodical launched by his grandfather that Ray revived in 1961, from a passionate concern for the enlightenment of children, a project that grew to be a passion of his in his last years. A selection of reviews of Ray’s films, national and international, arranged chronologically and filmwise offer a record of the world’s perception of and response to his films over four decades, in historical perspective. The volume as a whole, the product of several years’ research, has drawn on the rich collection of relevant documentary and archival material and memorabilia lying with the Ray family; and with the thoroughness that has gone into its documentation, it will be, for several years to come, the most authoritative and exhaustive and reliable work on Satyajit Ray.