FATHERS AND SONS

Kunal Sen paints an intimate portrait of his father, film director Mrinal Sen, in Bondhu

- Devarsi Ghosh

Mrinal Sen’s birth centenary inspired a series of programmes across Indian film festivals last year and films from Bengali directors Anjan Dutt, Srijit Mukherji and Kaushik Ganguly. Amidst the fanfare has arrived the very intimate Bondhu, a memoir from his son Kunal Sen.

Kunal has cut through the legacy of his father as a serious Leftist intellectual who rivalled Satyajit Ray and Ritwik Ghatak to arrive at a portrait of a humorous, self-absorbed but kind, middle-class man. The title Bondhu, meaning friend in Bengali, is what Kunal would call his father. He writes in the book, “...playing with me one day, he might have said that the two of us were friends, and somehow that got stuck in my mind. Whatever the reason, that is the only name I remember calling him.”

Based in Chicago, Kunal, 68, is a computer scientist and technologist. He had never been a writer. When Kunal began writing Bondhu, he knew what to avoid.