Nayak: The Hero

Nayak is a very important film in my career as an actor. This novelization of its brilliant original screenplay, fifty years after the film was made, is testimony to Satyajit Ray s enduring genius as a storyteller Sharmila Tagore Matinee idol Arindam Mukherjee is on his way from Calcutta to Delhi to receive a national award. In the restaurant car of the train, he encounters Aditi Sengupta, who edits Adhunika, a magazine for modern women. Aditi is not star-struck like her co-passengers, but decides to interview Arindam to gain more subscribers for her magazine. During the conversation, which unfolds over the next twenty-four hours, Arindam slowly sheds his carefully put together image of glamour and easy living, revealing his insecurities, fears and haunting regrets, and a phantasmagoria of old relationships, severed friendships and betrayals engulfs him. Aditi too lets her guard down and changes from the cold and sceptical journalist to a confidant and friend of the hero. One of Satyajit Ray s most loved films based on his own screenplay Nayak is a remarkably nuanced portrait of the life of a cinema superstar that is as powerful today as it was fifty years ago.


Genre: Literary Fiction