LIFE OF Pi

Title: LIFE OF PI

Genre: REALISTIC FICTION

Characters: Life of Pi Characters'

• Piscine Patel (Pi) – The main character and narrator of the story in the novel, Pi is a teenage Indian boy. His father ran a zoo and he practices three major religions – Christianity, Islam and Hinduism. The knowledge his father gives him about animals is key to his surviving in a lifeboat with Richard Parker, the 400 pound Tiger.
• Richard Parker – The 450 pound tiger and 227 day companion to Pi on the lifeboat, Richard Parker becomes not only Pi’s arch nemesis, but his closest friend and only reason to stay alive on the boat. Often taking on numerous human characteristics, Richard Parker is an ambiguous silent character throughout the novel.
• The Author – Only present as a voice in the first Chapter (directly) the author here is a narrator as well as a man seeking a story, which he finds in Pi. He later describes bits of Pi’s life as well as interacting with the adult Pi as he tells the story.
• Francis Adirubasamy - A close friend of the Patel family and a world class swimmer, it is Francis who is responsible for Pi’s name as well as sending the author to Toronto to hear Pi’s story.
• Pi’s Father – A zookeeper with strong political views and a habit of teaching his son all that he can about animals and their psychology. He dies after the ship sinks.
• Pi’s Mother – A caring woman and a natural educator, Pi’s mother reads a lot and shares what she can with her son. In Pi’s first story she dies on the boat. In his second, she is one of the survivors who eventually die on the boat.
• Ravi – Pi’s brother who becomes everything that Pi is not, popular and athletic. They are very close before he dies in the shipwreck.
• Satish Kumar' – Pi’s biology teacher and a masterful scientist who teaches Pi much of his thirst for knowledge. He is a natural atheist and teaches Pi the faith of an atheist as well as the desire to study zoology in college.
• Mr. Satish Kumar (Sufi) – The other Satish Kumar is a shopkeeper in the Muslim part of town and introduces Pi to Islam.
• Father Martin – A catholic priest who introduces Pi to Jesus Christ and the Catholic faith. They meet often and talk of Christ’s works, breeding in Pi the desire to accept multiple faiths.
• Tomohiro Okamoto and Atsuro Chiba – The two men from the Japanese Ministry of Transport who arrive on behalf of the Tsimtsum sinking to question Pi about his story of survival. They do not immediately believe him but consent to writing his story up in their report.

Setting: 1960-1976. Pondicherry, India; the Pacific Ocean; Mexico; Canada
Plot:  Life of Pi is a three part story of Piscine Molitor Patel, a sixteen- year- old South Indian boy who survives out at sea with a Bengal tiger for 227 days. Pi is raised in Pondicherry a Southern city in India, where his father runs a zoo. At the age of fifteen he adopts three religions Hinduism, Christianity, and Islam. Pi has been a Hindu from an early age, but considers himself to be devoted to all three religions.

Due to commotion by the government that has been bugging Pi’s father for quite some time, the Patel family decides to close the zoo and move to Canada. At sixteen, Pi, his mother, father, brother, along with the zoo animals all board the Tsimtsum (the animals are on the ship so they can be sold all around the world).

    An unknown reason causes the Tsimtsum to sink, and Pi is the only person to make it onto a lifeboat and survive. The lifeboat including Pi contains a hyena, a zebra, an orang-utan, and Richard Parker a Bengal tiger. As the journey continues most of the animals end up killing each other, leaving pi and Richard Parker as the sole survivors left on the boat. 

     While at sea, Pi and Richard Parker face challenges that only a pessimist could survive through. Without a sufficient amount of food and fresh water, both Richard Parker and Pi become severely weak and encounter high amounts of pain. During a severe period of starvation, Pi and Richard Parker become blind. They encounter a Frenchman that’s hidden agenda is to kill Pi and eat him. Without any idea of a tiger being on the lifeboat, The Frenchman steps into Richard Parker's territory and immediately gets attacked and killed.

      Pi and Richard Parker end up on a strangle island made up of algae, with trees growing from it, and no other life other than meerkats. After a couple of weeks of staying on the island, by Pi eating algae and Richard Parker eating meerkats, they begin to grow stronger. Pi starts to sleep in a tree on the island and shortly after realizes that the island in carnivorous. Pi becomes greatly disturbed by this realization, takes Richard Parker, and leaves the island. 
      Richard Parker and Pi after quite some time end up on a Mexican beach. As soon as they are on land Richard Parker immediately runs off into the jungle, without even acknowledging Pi. Pi finds Richard Parker's lack of delay deeply hurtful because they both experienced so much together. Pi is then found, fed and bathed, and taken to a hospital. At the hospital, two Japanese men come to question Pi on how the Tsimtsum sank. Pi tells his story, which the men do not believe, so he offers them another story. He replaces the animal characters with humans which cause his original story to be doubted on.       Richard Parker and Pi after quite some time end up on a Mexican beach. As soon as they are on land Richard Parker immediately runs off into the jungle, without even acknowledging Pi. Pi finds Richard Parker's lack of delay deeply hurtful because they both experienced so much together. Pi is then found, fed and bathed, and taken to a hospital. At the hospital, two Japanese men come to question Pi on how the Tsimtsum sank. Pi tells his story, which the men do not believe, so he offers them another story. He replaces the animal characters with humans which cause his original story to be doubted on.   Theme: Belief in God

Belief in God is clearly a major theme in Life of Pi, and has been the most controversial in reviews of the book. Throughout the novel, Pi makes his belief in and love of God clear—it is a love profound enough that he can transcend the classical divisions of religion, and worship as a Hindu, Muslim, and Christian. Pi, although amazed by the possibility of lacking this belief, still respects the atheist, because he sees him as a kind of believer. Pi’s vision of an atheist on his death bed makes it clear that he assumes the atheist’s form of belief is one in God, without his realizing it until the end. It is the agnostic that truly bothers Pi; the decision to doubt, to lack belief in anything, is to him inexcusable. This is underscored in that essential passage in the novel when Pi asks the Japanese officials which of his two stories they preferred—he sees no reason why they should not believe the better story.

Pi’s devotion to God is a prominent part of the novel; it becomes, however, much less prominent during his time aboard the lifeboat, when his physical needs come to dominate his spiritual ones. Pi never seems to doubt his belief in God while enduring his hardships, but he certainly focuses on it less. This in turn underscores the theme of the primacy of survival.

The Primacy of Survival

The primacy of survival is the definitive theme in the heart of the book, Pi’s time at sea. This theme is clear throughout his ordeal—he must eat meat, he must take life, two things which had always been anathema to him before his survival was at stake. Survival almost always trumps morality, even for a character like Pi, who is deeply principled and religious. When Pi tells the second version of his story to the Japanese men, this theme is highlighted even more vividly, because he parallels his survival instincts in the second story to Richard Parker in the first—it is he, when he must survive, who steals food, he who kills the Frenchman. If the first version of the story is seen as a fictionalized version of the second, the very fact that he divides himself from his brutal survival instinct shows the power of that instinct.

Storytelling

The act of storytelling and narration is a significant theme throughout Life of Pi, but particularly in the narrative frame. That Pi’s story is just that—a story—is emphasized throughout, with interjections from the author, Pi’s own references to it, and the complete retelling of the story for the Japanese officials. (This is not to mention chapter ninety-seven, which contains two words: “The story.”) By including a semi-fictional “Author’s Note,” Martel draws the reader’s attention to the fact that not only within the novel is Pi’s tale of survival at sea an unverified story, but the entire novel itself, and even the author’s note, usually trustworthy, is a work of fiction.

This is not to say that Martel intends the reader to read Life of Pi through a lens of disbelief or uncertainty; rather, he emphasizes the nature of the book as a story to show that one can choose to believe in it anyway, just as one can choose to believe in God—because it is preferable to not believing, it is “the better story.”

The Definition of Freedom

The true definition of freedom becomes a question early in Life of Pi, when Pi refutes the claims of people who think that zoos are cruel for restricting animals’ freedom. Pi offers evidence against this, questioning the very definition of freedom. An animal in the wild is “free” according to the opponents of zoos, and it is true that that animal is not restricted in its movement by a physical cage. It is, however, profoundly restricted by its survival needs and its instincts. If that animal is guided solely by its need for food, water, and shelter, is it really free? If it will never intentionally wander outside of the territory it has defined for itself, is it really free? In a zoo, where the animal’s needs are always provided, isn’t it more free?

The question of freedom arises again as Pi finds himself in a fight for survival at sea. He is without responsibility to anyone else, he is without any need to be anywhere in the world, he is perpetually in motion; yet he has probably never been less free, for he must always be putting his survival above all else. An example of this is that he can no longer choose to be a vegetarian—he must eat meat to stay alive. Throughout Life of Pi, the primacy of survival, of life, greatly restricts “freedom,” and thus redefines the very word.

The Relativity of Truth

The relativity of truth is not highlighted as a major theme in Life of Pi until the last part of the novel, when Pi retells the entire story to make it more plausible to the officials who are questioning him. He then asks the officials which story they liked better, since neither can be proven and neither affects the information they are searching for—how the ship sunk. This question implies that truth is not absolute; the officials can choose to believe whichever story they prefer, and that version becomes truth. Pi argues to the Japanese officials that there is invention in all “truths” and “facts,” because everyone is observing everything from their own perspective. There is no absolute truth.

Science and Religion

The theme of science and religion as not opposed but in concert with each other is present primarily in the framing of the narrative. It is exemplified in Pi’s dual major at the University of Toronto of Religion and Zoology, which he admits he sometimes gets mixed up, seeing the sloth that he studied as a reminder of God’s miracles. Similarly, Pi’s favorite teacher, Mr. Kumar, sees the zoo as the temple of his atheism. The theme of the connection between science and religion also is related to Pi’s respect for atheists, because he sees that they worship science as he worships God, which he believes is not so very different.

Loss of Innocence

The theme of loss of innocence in Life of Pi is closely related to the theme of the primacy of survival. Its significance is reflected in the geographic structure of the book—in Part 1, Pi is in Pondicherry, and there he is innocent. In Part 2, Pi is in the Pacific Ocean, and it is there that he loses his innocence. That Part 2 begins, not chronologically with the Tsimtsum sinking, but with Pi inviting Richard Parker onto the lifeboat, also reflects this, for it represents Pi reaching out for what Richard Parker symbolizes—his own survival instinct. And it is this survival instinct that is at the heart of Pi’s loss of innocence; it is this survival instinct that drives him to act in ways he never thought he could.

Throughout Part 2 there are other representative moments of a loss of innocence, besides the symbolic one of bringing Richard Parker onto the lifeboat. The most important of these is the death of the Frenchman, which Pi describes as killing a part of him which has never come back to life. That part can certainly be read as his innocence.

Symbolism: Hyena - the vicious, cannibalistic cook from the ship, kills both the "zebra" and the "orangutan", plainly represents the ruthless evil in the world
--Zebra - a young Chinese sailor whose leg is broken, represents the vulnerable things in life and how they are attacked (like by the "hyena" who eats the zebra inside-out)
--Orangutan - Pi's mother, represents safety and protection, earlier described as a "Holy Mary" mother figure (and we find out she was)
--Tiger AKA Richard Parker - Pi himself, represents Pi's inner strength (when Richard Parker disappears once Pi is on land again, it shows he was never real, only what Pi needed for strength), kills the "hyena

Pi's lifeboat = faith
Island = Religion
Sea and Sun = harsh realities of real life, scrutinizing your faith
Trees = clergy/priests/rabbis/imams, etc.
Meerkats = followers of religion

Pi

Piscine Molitor Patel’s preferred moniker is more than just a shortened version of his given name. Indeed, the word Pi carries a host of relevant associations. It is a letter in the Greek alphabet that also contains alpha and omega, terms used in the book to denote dominant and submissive creatures. Pi is also an irrational mathematical number, used to calculate distance in a circle. Often shortened to 3.14, pi has so many decimal places that the human mind can’t accurately comprehend it, just as, the book argues, some realities are too difficult or troubling to face. These associations establish the character Pi as more than just a realistic protagonist; he also is an allegorical figure with multiple layers of meaning.

The Color Orange

In Life of Pi, the color orange symbolizes hope and survival. Just before the scene in which the Tsimtsum sinks, the narrator describes visiting the adult Pi at his home in Canada and meeting his family. Pi’s daughter, Usha, carries an orange cat. This moment assures the reader that the end of the story, if not happy, will not be a complete tragedy, since Pi is guaranteed to survive the catastrophe and father children of his own. The little orange cat recalls the big orange cat, Richard Parker, who helps Pi survive during his 227 days at sea. As the Tsimtsum sinks, Chinese crewmen give Pi a lifejacket with an orange whistle; on the boat, he finds an orange lifebuoy. The whistle, buoy, and tiger all help Pi survive, just as Orange Juice the orangutan provides a measure of emotional support that helps the boy maintain hope in the face of horrific tragedy.

WHAT DOES THE TITLE MEAN IN RELATION TO THE FILM AS A WHOLE?

It was all about the struggle and survival of Pi in the middle of the ocean and how he somehow befriended the tiger and built a relationship to an animal. It’s all about his journey of survival and realizations in life through his experience in the ocean.

AMONG THE CHARACTERS, TO WHOM CAN YOU RELATE TO?

I can relate to Pi’s struggle, not because I was weak but in spite of hardships that came into my life and I survived it all because of my hope that goods things will eventually come my way. And it was very strong of him to survive the Calvary in the ocean. It was a sense of being strong because you have to and it was your only option to survive in this complicated world we lived in.

WHICH PART OF THE PRESENTATION STRUCK YOU THE MOST? WHY?

The part when Richard Parker did not bid goodbye to Pi at the very last moment of their journey together, it was just sad that the animal you have been with for the last 227 days of your journey in the sea did not even glance at you for the last time and just simply left you hanging and leaving you behind. For me it was like shuttering the good and bad memories we have into pieces, memories embedded forever in my heart.

WHAT IS THE MOVIE’S MESSAGE?
The movies message is to be brave enough to face reality, treasure relationships, and never lose hope. And have faith that no matter what happens to your life, how messy it looks like it would always fall into its right places at its own time. Treasure the moment, savour the memories left by yesterday and live the lesson learned for tomorrow.

DID I LIKE THIS IN GENERAL? WHY?
Yes! It was entertaining, majorly breath taking and full of thrill. With complete fantasy, love, friendship, regret, sadness, survival and adventure with important lessons. A little dramatic movie with full shocking effects that could make you keeps on watching for the next scenes. So what more could I ask for? It was really absolutely an entertaining movie! Two thumbs up!

DID I AGREE WITH THE MAIN THEME/ PUROPSE? WHY OR WHY NOT?
Yes I will absolutely agree for the purpose simply because it tells us that life has everything it has to offer to us. All we got to do is ride with the roller coaster life with full of ups and downs along the way that could make us even better and stronger for our future. With faith and hope in our souls and with the deepest sincere intentions in our hearts nothing is impossible, as the saying goes we are the captain of our own life, how you face your life is, is how you will have a life that you yourself made.

WHAT SPECIFICALLY DID I LIKE OR DISLIKE? WHY?
I like the part when Pi and Richard Parker were having this mutual understanding to each other that in order to survive both of them should co-exist with each other for survival in the middle of nowhere. It was a relationship with respect and understanding to each other. A step by step process where you have to built a relationship in order to survive in this harsh world, just like in real times, you had to adjust and to build good relationship to other people.

ARE THERE ANY ASPECTS OF THEME WHICH ARE LEFT AMBIGUOUS AT THE END? WHY?
At the last part it made the viewers confused weather which story to believe, the animal story part or the human story part. The director gave the viewers the choice which end would they prefer and since it was half open ended it was up to us to decide what ending the story should have, an open ended story that would make us wander what should have happened in the ending.

HOW DOES THIS FILM RELATE TO THE THINGS THAT ARE HAPPENING TO YOUR LIFE?
We could always dream for a perfect life, but perfection was far from reality because in reality change is constant, thus in my life, no matter how many problems I do have, as long as I stay positive in life and have that hope in my heart I think little by little I could conquer it all. And prove to everybody that I am bigger than my problems and anything can be solved by not simply in effort but also with faith in God to give us courage to go on in this life. And by the help of the people around me I think I could carry on with my life.

just being me..

Can't Say

I love you so much that it makes me cry
I would do anything for you, even die
I wanna tell you these things if I could, if I may
but it's one of those things that to you I can't say
I would climb up a mountain to hear you talk
I would swim the Atlantic to watch you walk
I would love to tell you it would make my day
It's just one of the little things that to you I can't say
I wanna make you believe all the things that I feel
I wanna let you know what I feel is for real
I know for these feelings I'm gonna pay,
but unfortunately, I can't say
I look your way and almost faint
It's so hard acting like a saint
I would like to tell you, it would blow you away
Unfortunately I can't say!

~it was a side of me being a sore looser for being so afraid to confess my feelings, probably because I don’t such have enough confidence and end up so hurt inside. It was always a one sided love of mine, I had imagined how it could be but it will be always be a dream for me. Loving is good thing, it will come if it were meant to come, and maybe not the most important is that you have been patient to wait for the right time to come. So for now I will be contented for a one sided love even if sometimes it makes me hopeless of a love I deserve.

realization, learnings, resolution

REALIZATIONS, LEARNINGS, RESOLUTION

I had realized that even though my last year memories was not just all about happiness but mixed with despair, hatred and unhappiness but still I will be forever thankful to the dear God for giving me my needs spiritually and materially. I have been very hateful to those who had wounded me so deeply (emotionally), and been very bitter and very unhappy for some time already. It’s hard to move on and forget when it had given you much reason to be in despair.  Not all of my wants but mostly of them I did acquire them last year, I have achieved some of my goals and have been contented with my simple life with the most important people in my life,  my family.

I had learned that life was never perfect and there is no such thing as perfect in this world, it is how you live your life, no matter how imperfect your life is you could always fill it up with good memories and good perspective in life. Therefore in my case I have just lingered too much on the bitterness that I had felt that’s why I didn’t fully enjoy my year.  Another is maybe there is a reason for loosing someone because it was a way of God telling me that don’t be sorry for what you have lost because something greater is coming your way, and God just saved me from wrong people. And I had learned to be positive always and to give importance on myself.

My resolution this year I will be better to others, I will really try to weigh things out in order for me to avoid hurting others. I will love to be optimistic in any situations and to focus on my goals. For me to achieve my goals and to study hard, do all my assignments and to be more open to others, to speak out my mind and to be responsible at all times. Stop being bitter to small things that could just only lead to stress and frustrations in my life. To be God fearing and to always make my family my number one list of priority in my life.