Benegal on Ray on YouTube

Fans of Satyajit Ray, the film director, will thank a good samaritan, whose YouTube ID is kishor101982, for posting on that Web site, in its entirety, a valuable 1984 documentary on Ray's life and (mostly) work by Shyam Benegal, himself a giant of Indian cinema. To stay within YouTube's stringent 10-minute length limit, kishor101982 has chopped up Benegal's documentary into fourteen clips -- numbered from 0 to 13; we may have a computer programmer here! -- of reasonably high quality.

Luckily, I did not feel that I lost much in having to watch the film clip by clip with an interruption every nine-and-a-half minutes or so. Perhaps the documentary nature of the film had something to do with it; the annoyance factor would probably have been higher for a typical narrative feature film. In any case, one wonders what purpose is served by YouTube's ten-minute length limit if it is possible to get around it the way kishor101982 has. Sure, a ten-minute clip will load faster than a ninety-minute clip, but people who post to YouTube are aware of these trade-offs. So, why not let them make their own choices?