Bankubabur Bandhu (Banku Babu's Friend or Mr. Banku's Friend) was a Bengali science fiction story Ray had written in 1962 for Sandesh, the Ray family magazine, which gained popularity among Bengalis in the early 1960s. What differentiated Bankubabur Bandhu from previous science fiction was the portrayal of an alien from outer space as a kind and playful being, invested with magical powers and capable of interacting with children, in contrast to earlier science fiction works which portrayed aliens as dangerous creatures.
Several science fiction films were inspired by the story, including Ray's own script for The Alien (which was eventually cancelled in the late 1960s), Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), and Rakesh Roshan's Koi... Mil Gaya (2003), which itself inspired the Indonesian television series Si Yoyo. The story of Bankubabur Bandhu itself was eventually adapted into a television film by Satyajit's son Sandip Ray alongside Kaushik Sen in 2006.
Read more about this topic: Literary Works Of Satyajit Ray