Between 1955 and 1991 Satyajit Ray made 29 features, two shorts, and five documentaries. He was a musician, a novelist and short story writer illustrator and editor of a children’s magazine. Ray is the aristocratic product of an intellectual famlity that combined the classical culture of East and West. Equally familiar with Western and Indian music and literature, he plated the piano himself., and wrote as fluently in Enflish as in Bengali. A great admirer of John Ford, his love for cinema flowerd when he watched Jean Renoir shooting the The River in India. He made his first film, Pather Panchali, on a shoe string budget, working on weekneds free from his job with an advertsing company in Calcutta. After the award it won at Cannes in 1956, international recognition never stopped. He was awarded the Legion of Honour by the President of France and, just before his dath, the American Oscar for filetime Achievement. His cinema, sophisticated, subtle, committed to a univeral humanity that transcend barriers, has influence Indian filmmakers across the country while internationally today he is considered one of the greatest masters of cinema.