My life after Pi

Candy Hunt - Anuradha Malalasekara

By the time the mercury reached sweltering 46 degrees in Sydney marking its hottest day ever, I was in a cosy theatre savouring every bit of Ang Lee's latest cinematic extravaganza, 'Life of Pi'. It was one of my dreams I had been preserved to myself since I read Yann Martel's novel 'Life of Pi' few years back. I am sure that I picked the book from the isles of Colombo British Council merely because it has won the Booker Prize. But soon after I started reading it, my imagination went wild and word by word some lumps of weights started to grow in me.

The story in question is one the young man of the title, Piscine (Pi) Molitor Patel, tells about how he survived for 227 days after the Japanese ship carrying him and his family from India to Canada, along with a collection of zoo animals, sank in the Pacific, at which point he found himself sharing a lifeboat with a hyena, a zebra with a broken leg, an orang-utan, and an adult male Bengal tiger.

Tale in brief

However, when he is confronted with the skepticism of one of the officials from the Japanese Ministry of Transport investigating the ship's sinking, Pi provides an alternative version of his tale of survival, a version that replaces animals with people.

A scene from Life of Pi

Pi then puts a question to the investigators: "So tell me, since it makes no factual difference to you and you can't prove the question either way, which story do you prefer? Which is the better story, the story with animals or the story without animals?" When both officials choose the story with animals, Pi replies, "Thank you. And so it goes with God"

Along with Pi's extreme faith in God, the writer drives us to a platform where you can decide what the 'better story' is. We sometimes rely ourselves on strictly empirical evidences and sometimes we seek the refuge of subjective 'incredible' matters.

Life of Pi is organized around a philosophical debate about the modern world's privileging of reason over imagination, science over religion, materialism over idealism, fact over fiction or story.

I am delighted about how Pi got his name in the first place. As his name might suggest, combines in his character the capacity for both cognitive and affective approaches to knowledge. Named after the famous art-deco swimming pool built in Paris in 1929, the Piscine Molitor, Pi has been caused much grief by his birth name because of its homonymic resemblance to "pissing." And so he undertakes to rename himself Pi, "that elusive, irrational number with which scientists try to understand the universe".

Deep pacific

His religion focused thinking convinces him that none of his stories - either with animals or people - would never bring back his parents or his brother. Nor the cause which made the ship sinks in the deep pacific. Being a really good swimmer and knowledge of animals since his tender age (his family belonged a zoo) Pi's background could even fit to deliver a realistic outlook to the novel. Also from a life saving device, he also possessed an essential item for tiger taming - a whistle.

Yann Martel is just like a hardware store to me.

This Canadian author gave me much needed raw material to build up my 'better story' out of Life of Pi. Martel is truly a DIY (Do it yourself) maestro.

As Martel revealed to media, even he has been surprised to see how unique Ang Lee reproduced his book in the silver screen. Therefore it has not left anything to me to talk about the movie here. But, I would not stop thinking about Life of Pi until the end of my life.