Time & Perspective Quote by Satyajit Ray

Ray’s line lands like a dry aside, but it’s really a scalpel aimed at an industrial reality: in mainstream Indian cinema, celebrity is a scheduling problem before it’s an artistic presence. The image is almost absurdist - an actor parachuting into Bombay for a couple of hours, then ricocheting to Madras by evening - yet Ray doesn’t grandstand. He ends with the shrugging coda, “It happens,” letting banality do the indictment.

The intent is practical and quietly polemical. Ray is pointing to a system where the star’s body is the scarce resource, not the director’s vision. If performers are “working in ten or twelve films at the same time,” the movie becomes modular: scenes designed around availability, performances stitched together out of fragments, a director forced into traffic management. The subtext is about authorship. Ray, a filmmaker associated with meticulous craft and human-scale realism, is implicitly contrasting his kind of cinema - patient, immersive, attentive to continuity of mood - with a factory model where continuity is what you sacrifice first.

Context matters: Ray’s career sat adjacent to, and often in tension with, the star-driven commercial juggernaut. His observation doesn’t romanticize hardship; it diagnoses incentives. When actors can monetize omnipresence, the culture rewards visibility over depth. Ray’s restrained phrasing is the point: he doesn’t need to call it grotesque. The logistics already are.