[Oe List ...] OpEd ST Thursday Season's greetings

Tue Dec 11 20:03:04 PST 2012

Theawesome world of teenager Pi

The Lifeof Pi is Yann Martell's best selling yarn of thePondicherry-born Pi (aka Piscine Molitor Patel) made into filmunder the direction of Ang Lee, (Li Ang to the Chinese), the Taiwan-borncolleague of Spike Lee, and known for directing the controversial Brokeback Mountain film of same-sex affections.

Out title forthis article is from our feeble translation of the Chinese movie title (the"awesome" may also be translated as "bizarre, weird, strange,illusory and/or magical") currently showing both on regular and 3Dscreens.  I saw the 3D version, worth the¥-cost, allowing me to commune with the zoo residents of the old PondicherryBotanical Gardens up close and personal. Awesome.

I start atthe edges.  

There is Gérard Depardieu, the renowned French actorand director who is three years our junior but whose recent mid-girth imagesdouble ours.  He plays a French cookon-board the ill-fated Japanese cargo ship for carnivorous sailors.  He had no sympathy to the vegetariancharacters from India sailing across the Pacific.  

We already mentioned France's Pondicherry, which is set to introduce thecharacter of Pi and to narrate the circumstances that led to the voyage, longin the book telling but marvelously and powerfully cinematographed at theopening of the movie.

Pi's family decides to move to Canada with their menagerie when publicfunds in Pondicherry were no longer extended to the maintenance of the gardensand its animals.  Crossing the MarianasTrench, complete with a map and a foreboding "deep" in the movie,they run into a storm that we are only too familiar with in our protractedstays in places like Oahu, Majuro, Nuku'alofa, Kolonia, Hagatña, and Saipan.

The plot thickens to the main story, which is how a vegetarianHindu-Christian survives 288 days afloat the misnomered "Pacific"ocean with a ferocious fully-fanged misnamed (Richard Parker) Bengali tiger ona 30-passenger lifeboat. 

The tongue-in-cheek reference to religious practices and the God-speak ispart of the context.  Our young teenagerPI embraces Hinduism, Christianity, and Islam before he reaches puberty, to thegreat dismay of his science-enamored parents who would rather that the he makesa choice of practice rather than fall into the nebulous world of the muddledmixed middle. 

Then, we get to the final confrontation between the young teenager, thetiger, and the sea.

Facing the wide expanse of the awesome and aweful universe, Pi's Hinduismremains unalterably all embracing in his affirmation of the unfathomablemysteries of his life.  Though not shownto be Madrasah-trained, with a laser-beamed disciplined awareness of beancounting cans of water and biscuits/wafers, Pi remains alert to the limits ofhis possibilities and brave enough to know in his bones that if elements inone's surrounding is non-compliant, like Richard Parker, it can, at least, betrained. 

Then life runs into its illusions, actual in Pi's telling, imagined as amirage to those familiar with the desert and the open seas.  Pi and Parker run into a verdant island, afloating huge algae, hospitable and sustaining during day but acidic and toxicat night.  Pi had a pond of fresh waterand roots to fill his carb needs, and Parker had thousands of malleablecreatures for lunch, but the island turned the evening shadows into anightmare.  The duo survived and afterfilling up provisions, sailed away.

A strange catholic pieta comesthrough as the exhausted Pi finally cradles on his lap the head of the equallyemaciated tiger, the earlier allusion to the mysteries of the Christ ofcompassion with a Padre at a Portuguese Church. The religious theme got a final brush in the cinematographic tableaubefore it hit the shores of Mexico.

"I have a story that will make you believe in God," is a lineearly on in the novel and in the movie. Hinduism, Christianity, and Islam gets early billing, with Judaism'sKabbalah gets a line when Pi the professor claims he lectures on the subjectalso.

Japanese insurance company accountants that covered the cargo shipprovide the epilogue segment of the film, interviewing their sole survivor fortheir report.  Pi's story was toofantastic to be believed, so Pi personified the zebra, hyena, gorilla, and thetiger with those of his parents and the ship's cook.  The accountants' report stayed with the storyof Pi and the tiger.  

Belief in God is anaccount of the real.  (Pi's pi in one scene is 3.14, then to the nth degree.  It is also represented by 22/7, and 335/113, never a whole number!)  In any case, however we relate our story, stories reveal beliefs, not beliefs determining stories.

Pi's complaint was that the tiger never even bothered to say"goodbye."  In an earlierepisode before he left Pondicherry and his first heartthrob, Pi recalled thatthe parting did not include uttering "goodbye".  

For three thousand years, humankind told their story in God-speak,too.  In the life of this meat-eatingformer teenager from Northern Philippines, God walked away without saying"goodbye", as well.  "ForUnto Us a Child is Born" is the season's wondrous and awesome theme, notthe Magi's appearance, and their going away without saying goodbye.

I am with Pi on God in this one.

 j'aime la vie

Yesterday, appreciate; tomorrow, anticipate; today, participate.  In all, 
Celebrate!

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