The Wanderer

I’ve been thinking of the sea lately. I watched the Life of Pi when I was a young boy, maybe 12 or 13. As a young Indian boy in catholic school I found the story captivating. I thought of myself in that position, a boy and a tiger lost at sea. I thought for sure I wouldn’t survive such a journey. The tiger would eat me well before the sea did. Still my biggest takeaway at that age was how beautiful the movie was. I saw the wonder of the sea, the beauty in the waves, and the soul of the animals. I saw the pain and the suffering as well, but it was always on the backdrop of the most epic of images. I remember thinking an experience like that makes you realize who you truly are.

For those who haven’t read the book or seen the movie, I highly suggest you do so. The Life of Pi is a story of a young Indian Boy who is in a terrible ship wreck where he is the lone survivor – along with an adult Bengal tiger. Yes it seems ridiculous but the story finds a way to make sense of the scenario, and once you move past the insanity of the situation, the story reveals its true meaning: Finding yourself. The main character, Piscine, is a very religious boy. He grows up Hindu but finds Christianity and Islam during his adolescence. Taking bits and pieces of the religions, he finds God everywhere in all forms. This supreme faith is tested when he finds himself alone on a life raft in the middle of the pacific with an ever hungry Bengal tiger. The story tackles what is truly means to believe in God, and how with faith one can do anything.

I read The Life of Pi not long ago, a disheveled 21 year old not much wiser than I was when I first saw the movie. So beautifully written, so philosophical in its nature, the book felt like a perfect metaphor for finding yourself. While the movie focuses heavily on the action of the survival at sea, the book takes its time to set the spiritual backdrop of the movie. The spiritual journey Piscine went through reminded me of my own. I was raised a Hindu, my parents passed their wisdom and their culture down to me and my sister from birth. I was not a very devout Hindu as a kid, I would reluctantly follow the fasts, fight sleep and backache at the temple, and eat prasad (blessed food) because it was handed to me. I knew what I had to do, but had no concept of the deeper meaning. Even as my dad read me the Ramayana as a bedtime story, a story was all it was.

Things changed when I went to catholic school. I was an outsider following the wrong religion in a school full of devout Catholics. I learnt something very quickly in this experience: Most kids don’t understand religion in the way their parent’s or teachers want them to. In catholic school we had tests on the bible, we would reluctantly fast for lent, we would fight sleep in Mass, we ate the Body of Christ because it was handed to us. The experience was the same, even if the religion was different.

As I grew older, the hatred I faced became more fierce. I would walk down the pews with my arms crossed, so the priests knows I am not deserving of the Body of Christ. People with ashen crosses drawn on their forehead would make fun of the red dot on mine. They couldn’t see that we we were all praying to the same God.

Piscine finds himself in the deep everlasting waters of the Pacific, thousands of miles away from land, a tiger in his midst, and he seeks God. He finds Vishnu in the fish he catches. He sees Allah in the rain clouds dropping fresh water into his buckets. He prays to God as the sun comes up. He asks for the strength to live another day.

After reading The Life of Pi, I realized that those petty differences we hold against each other fade away so quickly into the real truth of the matter. We’re all in this together, and we’re all searching for answers. What prayer you do or fast you take the meaning is all the same. The experience brought a whole new outlook in life that helped me see people in a new light. So often in today’s world religion and spirituality fade into the backdrop, but I think we are all trying to find out why we’re here and what we’re really doing. Knowing this eases my tension, knowing that truly we’re all in this together.

I mention all this not to convince you to join a religion or even leave one. Eventually the boundaries of religion faded for me, as it has for so many people. I searched for a higher power in any way I could, through books, through friends, through experience, and in the end I was left with myself.