Abhrajyoti Chakraborty

One of the strangest back stories behind a fabled film project. Perfect for Satyajit Ray's birthday. In 1952, a young man named Mike Wilson met Arthur C Clarke at a pub frequented by science fiction writers and fans and they soon became fast friends. It was Wilson who first got Clarke into skin diving and he and Clarke had lots of dives in the UK, before deciding that the tropics were really the place for this hobby. They ended up in Sri Lanka in 1956, where Clarke settled for the rest of his life and while Clarke's writing career blossomed, Wilson started a series of companies into diving, marine salvage and even pearl fishing while also becoming an acclaimed photo-journalist. He got into filming, making marine documentaries before helming Ranmuthu Duwa, the first colour Sri Lankan film and a huge commercial hit. Why remember him today? Well, when Satyajit Ray met Arthur C Clarke while wanting to make The Alien, Clarke put him on to Wilson. Wilson and Ray met in Calcutta, and Ray wrote a first draft screenplay. Wilson then set up a meeting with Peter Sellers in Paris, and then with Columbia Pictures in Hollywood. By then Ray was already suspicious of Wilson as Wilson had copyrighted the script in both names without him contributing a world. After years of discussion, the project floundered and then died when Peter Sellers announced his withdrawal. Wilson in the meantime also discovered Hinduism after viewing the Swayambhuva Lingam at the Konesar Temple in Trincomalee and renounced the material world, taking the name Swami Siva Kalki. He spent the last decades of his life trying to combine spirituality with science, trying to develop a Unified Field Theory, while also assisting on scripts as strange as one about a psychic elephant, which finally came out as Rampage, the first English film financed and shot in Sri Lanka. He died in 1995 On Ray's birthday, what better than to find the strangest back story behind the man who ended up ruining Ray's most ambitious project. Sidhu Jetha would have approved.