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

[Jack Gilles]

Great review Jaime! You are a wizard with words.

Bless you brother.

Jack

Sent from my iPad

On Dec 11, 2012, at 10:03 PM, Jaime R Vergara <svesjaime at aol.com> wrote:

  *The awesome world of teenager Pi*

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

Out title for this 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 3D
screens.  I saw the 3D version, worth the ¥-cost, allowing me to commune
with the zoo residents of the old Pondicherry Botanical Gardens up close
and personal.  Awesome.

I start at the edges.

There is Gérard Depardieu, the renowned French actor and director who is
three years our junior but whose recent mid-girth images double ours.  He
plays a French cook on-board the ill-fated Japanese cargo ship for
carnivorous sailors.  He had no sympathy to the vegetarian characters from
India sailing across the Pacific.

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

Pi's family decides to move to Canada with their menagerie when public
funds in Pondicherry were no longer extended to the maintenance of the
gardens and its animals.  Crossing the Marianas Trench, 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 protracted stays in places like Oahu, Majuro,
Nuku'alofa, Kolonia, Hagatña, and Saipan.

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

The tongue-in-cheek reference to religious practices and the God-speak is
part of the context.  Our young teenager PI embraces Hinduism,
Christianity, and Islam before he reaches puberty, to the great dismay of
his science-enamored parents who would rather that the he makes a choice of
practice rather than fall into the nebulous world of the muddled mixed
middle.

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

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

Then life runs into its illusions, actual in Pi's telling, imagined as a
mirage to those familiar with the desert and the open seas.  Pi and Parker
run into a verdant island, a floating huge algae, hospitable and sustaining
during day but acidic and toxic at night.  Pi had a pond of fresh water and
roots to fill his carb needs, and Parker had thousands of malleable
creatures for lunch, but the island turned the evening shadows into a
nightmare.  The duo survived and after filling up provisions, sailed away.

A strange catholic *pieta *comes through as the exhausted Pi finally
cradles on his lap the head of the equally emaciated tiger, the earlier
allusion to the mysteries of the Christ of compassion with a Padre at a
Portuguese Church.  The religious theme got a final brush in the
cinematographic tableau before it hit the shores of Mexico.

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

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

 Belief in God is an account 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 earlier episode before he left Pondicherry and his first heartthrob, Pi
recalled that the parting did not include uttering "goodbye".

For three thousand years, humankind told their story in God-speak, too.  In
the life of this meat-eating former teenager from Northern Philippines, God
walked away without saying "goodbye", as well.  "For Unto Us a Child is
Born" is the season's wondrous and awesome theme, not the 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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