Life of Pi: Lessons Against Fear, Anxiety, and Depression
Life of Pi is based on the best-selling novel by Yann Martel and the movie centres around a 16-year-old Indian boy named Pi Patel, the son of a zookeeper.
Before I briefly narrate the movie, I want to first highlight that the story of Pi Patel has been a significant one to help retrospectively make sense of my mild experiences with setbacks, anxiety, and depression. It is only until now, after watching the movie again, that I have been able to make sense of it and see a deeper connection to these past tribulations. To explain how, I need to narrate the movie briefly (Spoiler alerts to follow, skip to next part to avoid)
The movie begins with a writer approaching an adult Pi after hearing from Pi’s uncle that adult Pi had a story worth believing in God. Pi tells his story.
Young Pi and his family were relocating from India to Canada on a giant shipping vessel. This ship vessel was also transporting the animals from Pi’s father’s zoo. The ship is hit with terrible storm and sinks quite unexpectedly, killing almost everyone on board. The only survivors were Pi, a wounded zebra, a grieving orangutan, and a hyena, all of whom were left adrift on a lifeboat in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. In a daunting competition for survival, the hyena finishes off the wounded zebra and kills the orangutan. At this time, a Bengal tiger (called Richard Parker) emerges from under the raft covering and kills the hyena, leaving only Pi and the tiger on the life raft. Pi is then left to confront the paradoxical reality of survival that involved protecting himself from the tiger and keeping the tiger alive at the same time. Much later, they drift into an island that provided nourishment and shelter during the day, but was poisonous after sunset. Pi and Richard Parker quickly realised that their best chance of survival was to be back on the boat in the middle of the ocean.
I should note that the ending of the movie is what introduced a new layer of complexity beyond the existing layer of awe I was already battling with 70 mins in. The possibility of another version of events emerged, giving the entire story much more room for subjective interpretation and closure, but also more questions and ideas to grapple with.
In the twilight stages of the movie, Pi drifts into the shores of Mexico where he is found lying on the beach and taken to the hospital by locals. Before he is found, Pi sees Richard Parker, his friend-foe companion throughout his odyssey, go into the jungle without acknowledging Pi’s existence, much to Pi’s surprise or agony.
While in hospital admission, two Japanese officials visit Pi to complete an insurance investigation to account for the events of the shipwreck and understand how a 16-year-old boy survived in the Pacific for 227 days. Pi tells the Japanese investigators his story, mostly filled with narrations of his survival on a life raft with a tiger. To their rational mind, Pi’s story is one that is void of reason, especially since tales filled with details of ‘cannibalism and savagery on a 26foot long boat’, ‘perceived encounters with God during thunderstorms’, ‘numerous attempts to tame a wild tiger’, ‘stumbling into a mysterious island’, and ‘endless encounters with death’, could not be real.
The Japanese men refused to write Pi’s story because they feared it that his accounts were too unbelievable to publish. They asked Pi to present them with a more believable story.
Much to his disappointment, an emotional Pi concocts an alternative story, one that isn’t completely full of fallacy but more of symbolism. In the new story, however, Pi describes being stranded on the lifeboat with his mother, the ship’s cook, and an injured Buddhist sailor after the shipwreck. The cook becomes malevolent and kills the injured sailor, and then his mother, using them both as bait to catch fish. Furious and vengeful, Pi kills the cook in return.
Drawing back to the present, the author in the movie realises a symbolism after adult Pi recounts both versions of the story that he told the Japanese men (even before I did). The author realises the alternative story isn’t entirely different, as it centres on young Pi’s encounter with cannibalism and savagery in the early stages of his life craft journey involving the zebra, orangutan, hyena, tiger, and himself. It turned out that in the alternative story, Pi replaced the zebra as a sailor with an infected leg, the orangutan as his mother, the hyena as the French cook, and the tiger as himself, thereby stripping away all other fantastical aspects of the original story, only to leave the Japanese men with a much more disturbing yet believable story that involved humans this time.
At the end, adult Pi asks the author, “Which story do you prefer” — the fantastic, surreal one full of magical adventure or the dark, hopeless, yet reasonable one?
I think our lives have a relationship with this story, and the highs and lows of Pi’s odyssey have a strong resemblance with those of us still trying to find some hope through our anxiety and fears.
When it comes to finding meaning in our current contexts, professionally or socially, there are times when we may have been struck with deep confusion and complexity of thoughts. Sometimes, it is thoughts about whether our current struggles are the worst we would face or are only just the beginning, or thoughts about whether our happiest days are ahead or behind us. Other times, it is thoughts about whether relying on God to make sense of our struggles is an ‘easier’ path than relying on reason and logic. There are times when we have had to face possibilities of being a failure, we have had to wrestle with feelings of mini existential crisis that were nullifying everything we should have been grateful for and proud of. These feelings kept us up at night but also woke us up in the mornings.
Actually, what made me feel connected to Pi also is that I remembered recent seasons in my life where I suddenly found myself feeling alone in a vast ocean. I had taken big steps that the devil on my shoulder kept telling me I was not ready or qualified for. I was surrounded by new and old friends, yet felt tremendously alone, unable to articulate my state of confusion and fear of where I currently was in life. I had family and friends on speed dial, but I was always trumped with thoughts that they would not relate to my mini existential struggle.
Sometimes our source of anxiety and fears about the future is knowing we have no Plan B other than our current practice, knowing we have nothing to fall back on. We sometimes say to ourselves, “if I fail this, who am I? who will I become?”. We have somehow made it seem like our whole life has set us up for where we currently are and failing was equivalent to the potential end of life. Some of us dread going to bed because the next day symbolises another chance to find a light at the end of the tunnel, as well as another chance to fail at doing so. And for every day we see no light at the tunnel’s end, the more we contend with the anxiety of a new day.
One thing that struck me was the realisation Pi came to when writing in his journal, he said: “without Richard Parker i would have died by now, my fear of him keeps me alert, tending to his needs gives my life purpose”. He had no other choice but to literally feed his fears. I cannot imagine how incredibly difficult that realisation must have been to accept. Maybe, like Pi, we can use our fear and anxiety to become our saviour? What if knowing we have no plan B becomes that alarm clock that gets us up in the morning? What if we use that fear to keep us going? Richard Parker was Pi’s fear, and maybe can be ours too, a fear that saddens and motivates us at the same time. If we don’t channel it properly, the fear can disconnect us from the world. We must respect that we have to feed it, and accept that it cannot be tamed.
Another part of the movie that I resonated with was the Pi’s encounter with the flesh eating island. The island should have been a safe haven since it provided Pi and Richard Parker with food, shelter and clean water during the day. On his first night though, Pi found a human tooth inside the flower of the tree in which he found shelter, he then looked down into the lake he had previously swam in and saw the bones of the dead organisms, revealing the carnivorous nature of this mysterious island. Pi knew that he would have died if he remained on the island, even though the wealth of resources on the island initially got him preoccupied. This resonated strongly. We sometimes distract our loneliness and fears by spending time with people who we think would make us feel fine as long as we kept sharing laughters and drinks. We can spend time with people or get distracted by things to keep our minds away from the abyss, but when all is done we go to bed alone at night to return to our the reality we ran away from. We also trigger our fears and axiety when we see our friends and peers who appear to be doing well and immediately compare why we are not on their wavelength too. But what if all we see is their island during the day time and not their island after dark?
At the end of the movie, older Pi asked the author which story he prefers, the surreal or the alternative?. The author replied with the surreal one. This was the plot twist for me. It suddenly made me realise that Pi’s original story was even more surreal and closer to being imaginary. I began to see less reason in his original story each passing second. “Tigers? Mysterious islands? 200+ days in the Pacific? Who survives that?” And then I thought, “could the alternative story be the real story that happened?” “could it be that the gruesome story of watching his mother get killed by the cook, and then killing the cook himself was too dreadful of a memory to come to grips with, hence fabricating the surreal original story?”. Then it hit me. It didn’t matter what the real story was. The real story was only what I concluded to believe or accept and not what Pi was narrating. Like the author, what mattered was that my desire to believe was more important than my belief itself. What mattered was that Pi lived a life worthy of a story to inspire others, and he found meaning in telling that story. What’s my point here?
Pi makes us realise that we can actually believe the surreal and uncompelling accounts even though they seem improbable. Pi makes us realise that we all need something to believe in. Something that is beyond reason. Like Pi’s raft, we have to construct our faith, our hope, and thus our stories, especially when we are in the middle of our deep, void oceans. We have to think of our lives as a movie, one where we are the heroes in it. Pi’s story suggests that too much reason can be costly. Excessive reason can make us lose our virtue, our love, and our faith. Pi’s story challenges us to give faith a chance. This can be faith in yourself, faith in your ability, faith in your vision, faith in a better world, faith in God, or faith in all of the above.
And in our acts of being heroic and conscious like young Pi, we may achieve at least a fleeting glimpse of the power of faith. Faith that triumphs our fears.
To anyone reading this, I wish you all the best of luck throughout the years ahead and keep going on the journey of life.
