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	<DIV><FONT face="Courier New,Courier,monospace">Feluda</FONT></DIV>   <DIV>Feluda, also known as Prodosh Mitter, who lives in Calcutta. He is a private investigator, Holmes style, taking up only interesting cases and willing to put both physical and mental energy into solving them. He is assisted by his 14-year-old cousin, Tapesh (aka Topshe) an able lieutenant who records the cases and picks up useful snippets of Feluda's methods on the way. The two are also accompanied by Lalmohan Ganguly, an enthusiastic and cheerful companion who writes potboiler thrillers under the name of Jatayu. </DIV> <DIV>&nbsp;</DIV> <DIV>Ray said that he loved the Sherlock Holmes stories as a child, and the structure of the Feluda stories is very similar. They were originally written in Bengali for <I>Sandesh,</I> the children's magazine that his grandfather started in 1913. Each story starts with Feluda and Topshe at home, a client arrives and frames the mystery, and the trio set off on their adventures. Feluda is a Holmesian combination of mental and physical agility -- almost 6 feet tall, he is in fine shape due to his early-morning yoga -- and all his skills are called upon during the course of the story. </DIV> <DIV> <P><I>The Golden Fortress</I> is the story in which Feluda and Topshe meet Jatayu. The client in this story is the father of 10-year-old Mukul, who has started having vivid dreams of what is presumed to be a past life. The dreams involve the fort of the title, and contain many details about peacocks and sand, none of which the child has ever seen. A 'parapsychologist' takes the boy off to Rajasthan, hoping to pump his memories for hidden treasure. But nefarious scoundrels are also on the trail of this treasure -- will Feluda and co. get there in time? <P>Of course they will. The pleasure of such books lies in knowing that Feluda will undoubtedly outwit the crooks, but the reader can exercise his or her own brain in discovering their identities. <P>Unlike many modern thrillers, the Feluda stories are not at all gruesome. People are captured or tied up or even beaten up, but the reader is not assailed by blood and gore (as, quite likely, he would be if he read Jatayu's thrillers!). Sensitive children will not get nightmares after these books, but they are no less delightful for the lack of exploding eyeballs. <P>From an adult perspective, one of the charms of the Feluda stories is the sly commentary sprinkled throughout, which undoubtedly reflect the author's opinionsFeluda's world is strange in one notable respect -- there are no women. He is entirely surrounded by men. He has no aunts or female cousins, as is common in large extended families. Every person he comes across on a bus or train is male, as is every person selling chappals on the roadside or eating in a train. There are little boys, but no little girls. One might think the author was uncomfortable with women characters, if this had not been the same person who created Charulata, Durga and Arati in his movies. Feluda's household arrangements are a little mysterious too -- there is an occasional mention of Topshe's father, who seems to live in the same house, but no other relatives seem to live there or run the household. Perhaps Satyajit Ray left these particular mysteries for his readers to solve. <EM><FONT color=#990000>Excerpts from a review by <STRONG>Susan Chacko</STRONG>. She is a bioinformaticist in Maryland.&nbsp; </FONT></EM></P></DIV> <DIV> <P>Satyajit Ray (1921-1992), film director extraordinary, writer, Bengali cultural icon and scion of a clan noted for the contributions of several of its members to literature and art, was probably the most widely known creative artiste of India in the second half of the 20th century. Indeed, since the decease of Tagore, no other Indian has been as famous globally and received as much public admiration and critical acclaim all over the world as Ray.</P> <P>Though in the West he is best known as an Oscar-winning film-maker, Satyajit Ray's reputation in India extends to a great many other spheres. Besides being an artist (his portrait of Rabindranath Tagore appears on the 1961 Indian stamp commemorating his birth centenary, <!--https://www.angelfire.com/ms/stamp/hindu1.html-->and he designed the Ray Roman type-face), he was a prolific short story writer, with over a dozen volumes to his credit. Between 1965 and 1992, Ray wrote a total of thirty-five Feluda stories (in Bengali, his native language), featuring the master sleuth Pradosh C. Mitter, his assistant Topshe, and Lalmohan Babu (alias Jatayu), a bumbling writer of crime fiction. The locales range from Gangtok and Varanasi to Jaisalmer and Ellora, apart from Feluda's home town of Calcutta. The plots involve murder, intrigue and adventure, narrated in a racy, humorous style.His most famous creations also include Professor Shonku the scientist.</P></DIV>