'I met him in September, just days before he was hospitalised for Covid, for a documentary that his daughter was making.' 'He was in the pink of health, conversing with everyone the whole day.'
Naseeruddin Shah sets the gold standard as a master memoirist.
'He always seemed one of us, part of the great aspiring middle class -- his values, his simplicity, even the intellectual snobbery which he could barely hide,' observes Mousumi Sengupta.
This is an alternate list of 10 screen roles that saw Soumitra Chatterjee, a paragon of gentility, venture beyond his comfort zone and deliver masterclasses of subtlety and depth, lists Saibal Chatterjee.
The suave actor of the world, sometimes called the last of the Mohicans and familiar to students of cinema anywhere in the globe, acted in 14 Ray films and over 300 others, gracefully transitioning into commercial cinema in a variety of roles.
'I don't look forward to seeing my films because this only sort of gives me a deep sense of dissatisfaction that I could have done better, and I lose my self-confidence.'
'In Angamaly Diaries, dreams, kinks, small corruptions, cheap lives, and hopes are all given their due and that attitude frees us up to believe that perhaps there is more good than bad in the sum total of us.' 'This is a coming-of-age tale taken straight out of a diary written in blood,' says Sreehari Nair.
