I liked ‘Life of Pi’ for the same reasons that I liked the film ‘Life is Beautiful’ and ZNMD . I am fond of movies that celebrate life. (My ZNMD review started with the same sentence! )

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In an interview, Yan Martel, author of Life of Pi tells: “The subtext of Life of Pi can be summarized in three lines:
1) Life is a story. 2) You can choose your story. 3) A story with God is the better story.”

So lets then talk about Life, about stories and about God.

The film addresses Life by touching upon death, despair and then hope, fear and and then love and doubt and then faith.
Furthermore, Yam Martel says “Like ( the mathematical) pi, life itself is not finite. And so I didn’t make the title The Life of Pi: I deliberately left out the definite article, “The”. That would have denoted a single life.”

He continues-“The reason death sticks so closely to life isn’t biological necessity—it’s envy. Life is so beautiful that death has fallen in love with it , a jealous, possessive love that grabs at what it can. But life leaps over oblivion lightly, losing only a thing or two of no importance, and gloom is but the passing shadow of a cloud.”

Its interesting that the tiger, which to the marooned Pi is the most immediate source of death, is also the reason that he is able to survive and live. Caring for the tiger becomes a mission which also keeps Pi loving, alert and vital- the reasons why he survives.

Lets turn to God. The film is about knowing God (“here are limits to what you can do with a calculator or a hammer. You must make a leap of faith to get the full flavour of life.” says Yam Martel through Pi.) Pi embraces all three religion Lord Vishnu manifests as a fish which he kills to feed the tiger. “The blackness would stir and eventually go away, and God would remain, a shining point of light in my heart. I would go on loving. ” And living.

PI wants to know why the Japanese insurance agents have a problem with the ‘hard to believe’ the story. We must easily and readily embrace ‘hard to believe’ events and stories. It would be easy if one’s own story had God in it.

What about stories? I recall, Nithya Shanti, in his discourse at our home, had commented “who would we be without our stories”. Life of Pi is ultimately about our lives, our stories, about life’s stories, other’s stories, choosing the better story, ones we tell, ones we choose to believe- and then try and interpret and derive meaning from. Pi asks, is it important that the story has any meaning?

Does it matter that the movie had meaning, that this review has pretensions of having some? Choose what you want to take away, and if nothing that according to Pi would be just fine?Life of Pi