As a child, this writer remembers pinning her hopes on Sandesh. It was a monthly ritual of waiting and wanting. Sandesh, — not the mawa-milk sweet — but the monthly literary digest for children that was originally brought to life by Upendrakishore Ray, and later revived by Satyajit Ray in 1961. On the one hand, Ray was befriending one Bengali child at a time with his Feluda series, on the other he was touching young minds with vivid illustrations for Sandesh. A monthly dose of the magazine’s cover, and this writer would mull for days if a lion’s mane could branch out like a tree, if mahouts sat on plush velvet seats or if mauve and orange always looked attractive with splashes of white. His dwellings on design created bolder imprints on adult minds, too.

Satyajit Ray