Life of Pi

by Yann Martel

cosmogony

I called him Mamaji, mama being the Tamil word for uncle and ji being a suffix used in India to indicate respect and affection.

Gallic

Animals in the wild lead lives of compulsion and necessity within an unforgiving social hierarchy in an environment where the supply of fear is high and the supply of food low and where territory must constantly be defended and parasites forever endured.

For that is what animals are, conservative, one might even say reactionary. The

allow them

two relentless imperatives of the wild: the avoidance of enemies and the getting of food

In a zoo, we do for animals what we have done for ourselves with houses: we bring together in a small space what in the wild is spread out. Whereas

Such an enclosure is subjectively neither better nor worse for an animal than its condition in the wild; so long as it fulfills the animal’s needs, a territory, natural or constructed, simply is, without judgment, a given, like the spots on a leopard.

I know zoos are no longer in people’s good graces. Religion faces the same problem. Certain illusions about freedom plague them both.

even teachers forgot the fresh aquatic promise of my name and distorted it in a shameful way.

“Ganapathy Kumar,” said Ganapathy Kumar. “Vipin Nath,” said Vipin Nath. “Shamshool Hudha,” said Shamshool Hudha. “Peter Dharmaraj,” said Peter Dharmaraj.

“Ajith Giadson,” said Ajith Giadson, four desks away . . . “Sampath Saroja,” said Sampath Saroja, three away . . . “Stanley Kumar,” said Stanley Kumar, two away . . . “Sylvester Naveen,” said Sylvester Naveen, right in front of me. It was my turn. Time to put down Satan. Medina, here I come.

And so, in that Greek letter that looks like a shack with a corrugated tin roof, in that elusive, irrational number with which scientists try to understand the universe, I found refuge.

Like me, they go as far as the legs of reason

will carry them—and then they leap.

To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation.

Get even closer and you trigger a flight reaction from which the bird will not cease until the three-hundred-yard limit is set again, or until heart and lungs fail.

zoo detractors should realize that animals don’t escape to somewhere but from something.

Animals that escape go from the known into the unknown—and if there is one thing an animal hates above all else, it is the unknown.

Until it knows its rank for certain, the animal lives a life of unbearable anarchy. It remains nervous, jumpy, dangerous.

“When two creatures meet, the one that is able to intimidate its opponent is recognized as socially superior, so that a social decision does not always depend on a fight; an encounter in some circumstances may be enough.”

kumkum

turmeric

he told me a story. Or rather, since Christians are so fond of capital letters, a Story.

It was wrong of this Christian God to let His avatar die.

pandit