Indian cinema's versatile genius Satyajit Ray, who was conferred the Lifetime Oscar in 1992 when he was at his deathbed, now goes virtually global with the launch of a comprehensive website on his work and life.

www.worldofray.com, a comprehensive 250-page website with every aspect of the life and times of the maestro, is the Satyajit Ray Society's tribute to the most venerated Bengali after Rabindranath Tagore and the creator of the Apu trilogy.

The site, which comes 14 years after his death, is full of rare photos of the shooting of his films, stills from his celluloid gems, anecdotes and other information, including rare cover designs of his books and film posters.

It offers a rare glimpse into Ray's original sketches in 1950 that became the storyboard of the ground breaking 1955 film "Pather Panchali" ("Ballad of the Road").

Ray joined the British advertising agency D.J. Keymer in Kolkata in 1943 as a junior designer, a job that helped him bloom into a graphic artist, typographer, book-jacket designer and illustrator.

He went to London in 1950 on a commission from the company and saw many films, including Vittorio De Sica's "Ladri di biciclette" ("The Bicycle Thief", 1948) and Jean Renoir's "La Règle du jeu" ("Rules of the Game", 1939), which made abiding impressions.

According to the site, while returning from London by sea, Ray illustrated a children's edition of "Pather Panchali", a semi-autobiographical novel by noted Bengali author Bibhuti Bhushan Banerjee.

The sketches became storyboard elements when he made the film from the novel.

The release of "Pather Panchali" in 1955 brought Satyajit Ray instant international and national recognition and changed the language of Indian cinema forever as he went on to make two sequels of the character Apu - "Aparajito" and "Apur Sansar".

The site also has information about Sandesh, the four-generation-old children's magazine that has become synonymous with the family of Satyajit Ray.

It was the first successful periodical for young people in Bengal, launched by Ray's grandfather Upendrakishore in 1913, the year Rabindranath Tagore received the Nobel Prize for his collection of poems "Gitanjali".

During a recent launch of the site in Kolkata, the Satyajit Ray Society, which hosted the site, made an earnest appeal to the West Bengal government for a piece of land or an existing structure that could be turned into a Ray Museum.

The society also appealed for restoration of the works of Ray, whose films made another contemporary Japanese genius Akira Kurosawa comment "not to have seen the cinema of Ray means existing in the world without seeing the sun or the moon".

Filmmaker, son and Ray Society secretary Sandip Ray said: "We would make an earnest appeal to the West Bengal government to give us a piece of land or existing structure that can be appropriately adapted to suit our requirements."

"We would also appeal to the centre in the ministries concerned with information and culture to renew the kind of support they had once arranged for us, but did not fructify because of technical hitches," added society president D.N. Ghosh.

Ghosh outlined a five-point agenda for restoration work of Ray's works.

While 17 films, of the 36 gems of Ray, have been restored under the existing arrangements with the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Science Archives, the Ray Society would be given one copy of the restored print provided the society has a vault that meets the stringent international quality standards for safe storage.

"We therefore need a vault that can house not only the films that have been restored but all the remaining available films for which a good deal of work remains to be done," he said.

The Ray Society also plans to build a museum in Kolkata dedicated to Ray. "Our aim is not have just a vault for the films but make it an integral part of his legacy that will hold the entire cultural legacy of Ray," he said.

"Then we would like to built an auditorium and a space to built a gallery on Ray," he added.

"Finally, we also envisage a study centre and library in the museum along with facilities for scholars from across the globe to come and conduct research on Ray."