Books I loved

The life of Pi

By Yann Martel

This book was first published in 2002. It took me 10 years to finally pick up this book and read it. Almost everyone I know read  and absolutely loved it. After reading it I can’t really pinpoint why it is such a popular book and why it was a number one bestseller and winner of the Man booker prize. What I can say is how it touched me in a very unobtrusive and subtle way –stirring thoughts about God and religion especially – a topic I have been trying to avoid over the last couple of years – for the simple reason that it does not make sense to me all the time.

 These are some of the thoughts this book stirred in me-

Fear

Life’s biggest opponent is fear. There is the most beautiful reference to this and how fear is the root of failure. Let me quote here.

“Only fear can defeat life. It is a clever, treacherous adversary”.

He speaks of how fear begins in your mind, finds your weakest spot and … “slips into your mind like a spy” in the form of doubt.  He explains that doubt is disbelief – that we fight it with reason – but that reason can often come second in a battle against fear. Fear becomes anxiety which becomes dread.

“Quickly you make rash decisions. You dismiss your last allies: hope and trust. There, you’ve defeated yourself. Fear, which is but an impression, has triumphed over you”. 

Isn’t this so true?  Most of the negative thoughts we have of ourselves and others are born from fear. If we don’t fight and confront our fears, they become a part of us, define us and determine how we move through this life. He puts it so nicely in the last part of chapter 65, “Because if you don’t, if our fear becomes a wordless darkness that you avoid, perhaps even manage to forget, you open yourself to further attacks of fear because you never truly fought the opponent who defeated you”.

One thing I have learned recently is that we create our reality. In each current moment, we can keep changing our future. Yes, the past can be present and navigate our decisions – but only if we fail to acknowledge the past and the fears it instilled in us. If we do that – our future is free of past. It is free of fear and it is filled with hope and trust.

Reason

While reason is what makes us superior, what helps us adapt, helps us solve problems and survive in the most adverse circumstances, reason can also build walls around us. It can take away all sense of magic and strip us of the possibility of the impossible.  One picks up this theme quite often in the book.  He plays with thoughts about religion and the participation of or lack thereof by an interactive God in our lives. He draws parallels between science, explorers and our own renditions of the truth, what should and could be the truth and our own reasoning about our memories. It is quite beautiful really. I think in a way he tries to convey that we reason too much when it comes to the important things in life.

“At moments of wonder, it is easy to avoid small thinking, to entertain thoughts that span the universe, that capture both thunder and tinkle, thick and thin, the near and the far” (p. 233).

“Love is hard to believe, ask any lover. Life is hard to believe, ask any scientist. God is hard to believe, ask any believer. What is your problem with hard to believe?”

“…Reason is excellent for getting food, clothing and shelter. Reason is the very best tool kit. Nothing beats reason for keeping tigers away. But be excessively reasonable and you risk throwing out the universe with the bathwater”.

Religion

He speaks of his one spiritual desire- to love God. It is for this reason that he explores many religions and tries to understand the beauty of each of them in his own way. He does this silently and respectfully. He spends time with various spiritual leaders and learns a lot about God while doing so. He comes to believe that all these religions hold truth and wisdom and has something to teach and offer him. All of the teachings bring him closer to the God he wants to love.

A Moslem mystic taught him about union with God and everything else- this union made him immortal in a sense.  Christianity and Jesus made him aware of fallibility and its counterpart, love. From the Hindu religion he learned that it is not rites and rituals that are important, but what these rites and rituals stand for.

This until all these spiritual leaders came to know of each other and came to realise that each of them have been trying to convert Pi to their own religion. The thought that he could belong to all religions, infuriated them. Their wise, tranquil, calming, enlightened personas all of a sudden transformed into something horrific – something judgemental, far away and distant from the God he came to know. 

By creating this story the writer really accentuates the role of prejudice in our lives and how we apply this even in our spirituality. He accentuates the sadness of this and how this human tendency might be one of the contributing factors to the majority of people nowadays distancing themselves from religion and subsequently God.  In a democratic world where we hear words like equality and diversity on a regular basis –we still can’t seem to respect these values in our spirituality. The one place we need to respect it the most.

How many of us truly know and understand the spirituality of our neighbours? Can we listen to them, talk about their beliefs and spiritual passions without interrupting them and trying to convince them of our own? Can we listen without getting angry?

 “There are always those who take it upon themselves to defend God, as if Ultimate Reality, as if the sustaining frame of existence, were something weak and helpless. These people walk by a widow deformed by leprosy begging for a few praise, walk by children dressed in rags living in the street, and they think, “Business as usual”. But if they perceive a slight against God, it is a different story. Their faces go red, their chests heave mightily, they sputter angry words. The degree to their indignation is astonishing. Their resolve is frightening.  These people fail to realize that it is on the inside that God must be defended, not on the outside”.

Fantasy and the mystical

This is what makes us survive. Fantasy and the belief in the mystical is what make us rise above the mundane reality of reason.  It is true that when things go well or even when things go really bad – we lose our faith in or forget about the mystical. We want to understand everything. And if we can’t, it cannot be true.

 When Pi gets interviewed by two Japanese men and they don’t believe his animal story – he puts it to them quite cleverly. “I know what you want. You want a story that won’t surprise you. That will confirm what you already know. That won’t make you see higher or further or differently. You want a flat story. An immobile story. You want dry, yeastless factuality”.

After he tells them the “immobile” animal free version of his story – he asks them whether either of these versions provided them with any real proof to their question. They replied “no”. He then asked them which of the 2 stories they preferred – the animal story he told which they found highly improbable and least likely to be true – or the immobile, unsurprising animal-free story. They answered the former. His answer to this was, “And so it goes with God”.

This is almost a little sigh of relief he gives. When he realises that the desire to “want to believe” in something beyond us – is pretty much fundamental to all of us.  Our understanding of the world brings something to it. We each make life a different story. “Isn’t looking upon this world already something of an invention?”

Survival and suffering

Oh there are so many more themes he touches on. Survival, suffering and how one discovers your true nature when at your last end. How one has to challenge and question your own idiosyncrasies in order to survive. How one can collect knowledge and experience from the subconscious and find strength and power in a place unknown to the self before tragedy struck.  In a sense it teaches us that we should never underestimate what we know, learn and believe. What we know and believe will have a great impact on how we deal with suffering and how we choose to survive.

Man and Nature

I loved the way in which he put man and nature in one boat.  On a figurative level man and nature is in the same boat. We are here on earth and we are trying to survive. By creating 2 individuals (human and beast), the writer creates room for thought about our relationship with earth, nature and our fellow animal species. We have to eat, drink, find and build shelter, procreate, survive nature elements and live life as it comes naturally to us.

How we have lost the plot and forgotten about these basic rules of life. How we take for granted these basic needs and the pleasure and happiness they bring to us. The more needs and desires we unnecessarily create for ourselves, the more we take from and rob other species from their basic needs and pleasures. 

The interdependency of man and nature can also in a sense be read in this book. Pi often says that he would not have survived if he did not share the boat with this scary creature, the tiger. He needed to fear the animal in order to survive. He needed to fight for his right to live alongside this animal. This battle enforced in him respect and love for the animal. He had something to measure himself by: something great, but simple and uncomplicated. By understanding this animal, respecting it and loving it – he could take care of himself, but more importantly he could take care of and protect the animal in return.  

What he shows in this book too is our irrelevance and unimportance – although we always feel as if we are at the centre of things. He talks about this when he is on the boat. About being the centre of the circle. This is true of our perception of our existence.

Luckily we have nature to tell us the contrary. At times it is comforting and at other times it is downright scary. Nature is a mystery – it will continue to create, destroy and recreate. It lives perpetually. We are but visitors in wondrous place and time. Once again it is fantasy, mystery and spirituality that oversteps reason and comforts us by telling us we are mysteriously linked to all places and all time and that we do not flower in vain.   

I am quite looking forward to seeing the movie.