Another of the programs I looked forward to in the glory days was...Satyajit Ray Presents

While most non-Bengalis associate Ray solely with art-house films, he was also a writer with a predilection for mystery and horror stories (which I read much later in life). He would never be slotted amongst the known names in these genres and his horror stories all too often resorted to the lazy gimmick of the protagonist at the end being roused out of a faint by his (eerily) ubiquitous servant and realizing that whatever he had gone through was just a dream; but some of them are fairly decent and breezy.

Anyway, somewhere around 85-86, DD telecast two 13-Ep anthology series called based on his stories, adapted and directed for the TV screen by his son Sandip Ray. Like the earlier discussed Malgudi Days, this series was shot on film and not video, which made it visually much superior to the other serials. It also didn't hurt that Sandip had a great sense of how to present the material.

This serial had 2 seasons of which the first had a better crop of stories. Some of these I recall: Sadhan Babu's Suspicions, an almost one-man act. Utpal Dutt plays the suspicious Sadhan Babu who receives a mysterious package, which he, after various deliberations, assumes to contain a severed head. After more deliberation, he disposes of it in the river. He later learns that it contained an antique delivered to him. Simple idea, but done well.

The other one I recall in great detail, and which is one of my scariest video experiences of childhood (I was around 10 or 11 at the time), is Gagan Chaudhary's Studio. Here, Amol Palekar is an ad exec recently promoted after the sudden death of his predecessor. Along with promotion comes possession of the company flat where the predecessor had lived. But every night Amol finds his sleep disturbed by the light from the flat opposite. He decides to take up the issue with his neighbor by going to his flat at night and directly pointing out the disturbance caused by the light. His neighbor (played by a hollow-eyed Sriram Lagoo) is the titular Gagan Chaudhary, a portrait maker. As Amol goes through his catalog, he realizes with growing apprehension that all the people painted have died recently under mysterious circumstances. The last portrait he sees is that of his predecessor. A flash of a skeletal claw, and in the next scene, we see a smiling Amol fixing up his tie and telling the painter that he is ready for his portrait. Fuck. For a good while, I remained petrified of lights on in other flats at night.

The second season suffered from the dull Alien story about a boy that meets with an extra-terrestrial creature (Ray claimed that this idea and the basic design of the creature was something he had been shopping about in Hollywood years before Spielberg's ET). A good deal more interesting was the Feluda story where Shashi Kapoor played an older version of Ray's famous detective character. The action was set in exotic Kathmandu with Mohan Agashe, Utpal Dutt and Pankaj Kapur playing supporting roles.

Apart from this, a couple of the stories in this series were of the humanist type, again simple ideas done nicely. An example of this is the first episode, about a man who comes to his friend's place and makes all manner of small talk but leaves without stating any explicit business. The next day, his daughter comes asking for the small loan that he felt too embarrassed to ask on his own.

Thus SRP was on the whole a pretty nice anthology series and something to look forward to in the days when TV was not just the Idiot Box.