When Satyajit Ray, as a child, went with his mother to Santiniketan, Rabindranath Tagore wrote a short poem for him, the last lines of which translate as ‘But I failed to see with my eyes, just two steps away from my home/ On a sheaf of paddy grain, a drop of dew.’ Attracted by the obvious - the mountain or the ocean - we often fail to notice the beauty in the ordinary. Tagore’s influence on Ray would only grow with time. Much later, Ray would quote his teacher Nandalal Bose ‘Draw a tree, but not in the Western fashion. Not from the top downwards. A tree grows up, not down. The strokes must be from the base upwards…’ But it took a student of his sensitivity to appreciate ‘This was basic - the reverence for life, for organic growth.’