Life of Pi: Vocabulary words: Part 1.

Summary

Pi Patel, God-loving boy and the son of a zookeeper, has a fervent love of stories and practices not only his native Hinduism, but also Christianity and Islam. When Pi is sixteen, his family and their zoo animals emigrate from India to North America aboard a Japanese cargo ship. Alas, the ship sinks – and Pi finds himself in a lifeboat, his only companions a hyena, an orangutan, a wounded zebra, and a 450-pound Bengal tiger. Soon the tiger has dispatched all but Pi. Can Pi and the tiger find their way to land? Can Pi’s fear, knowledge, and cunning keep him alive until they do?

Vocabulary words: Part 1.

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“My suffering left me sad and gloomy.” (p.3)

- Gloomy: (adj) causing depression, dejection, or gloom.

“The key aim is to diminish an animal’s flight distance.” (p.39)

- Aim: (verb) to point (a weapon, missile, etc.) or direct (a blow) at a particular person or object; level.

“They only rid the canton of its few half-wild dogs.” (p.42)

- Rid: (verb) to relieve or deliver from something disagreeable or undesirable; make free (of).

“He was explaining to me how the brad baked on these heated pebbles when the nasal call of the muezzin wafted through the air from the mosque.” (p.59)

– Muezzin: (noun) the official of a mosque who calls the faithful to prayer five times a day from the minaret.

– Waft: (verb) to carry or be carried gently on or as if on the air or water.

- Mosque: (noun) a Muslim place of worship, usually having one or more minarets and often decorated with elaborate tracery and texts from the Koran.

He was a Sufi, a Muslim mystic.” (p.61)

- Sufi: an adherent of any of various Muslim mystical orders or teachings, which emphasize the direct personal experience of God.

“The guttural eruptions and long flowing vowels rolled just beneath my comprehension like a beautiful brook.” (p.62)

-Guttural: (adj) pronounced in the throat or the back of the mouth; velar or uvular.

–Beneath: (prep.) not as great or good as would be demanded by.

–Brook: (noun) a natural freshwater stream smaller than a river.

“Our encounters always leave me weary of the glum contentment that characterizes my life.” (p.63)

-Glum: (adj.) silent or sullen, as from gloom.

“Alas, the sense of community that a common faith brings to a people spelled trouble for me.” (p.64)

-Alas: (interj) an exclamation of grief, compassion, or alarm.

“My heart jumped before sinking very low.”pg64

- sinking: (noun) a feeling in the stomach caused by hunger or uneasiness.

“A few days after the meeting on the esplanade, I took my courage into my hands and went to see father.”pg71

-Esplanade: (noun) a long open level stretch of ground for walking along, esp. beside the seashore.

“All are instances of that animal equivalent of anthropomorphism.”pg84

-Anthropomorphism: (noun) the attribution of human form or behavior to a deity, animal, etc.

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Image 3

• “Mr. Kumar was the first avowed atheist I ever met. I discovered this not in the classroom but at the zoo.” (p.25) My next image is the symbol of atheism and I chose it because when Mr. Kumar appears in the book it’s the beginning of Pi talking about religions. This is very interesting for me because, as Pi says, teachers have many things to teach us about that sometimes there’s no time enough to learn them all during classes and the only solution is giving them extra time during our free time.

Image 4

• “Whatever the reason for wanting to escape, sane or insane, zoo detractors should realize that animals don’t escape to somewhere but from something.”(p.41) I liked this quote because for life to be fine or good there has to be always a balance between everything: light / darkness, sound / silence, heat / cold, life / death, mind / body, masculine / feminine etc. This is what happens with animals in zoos, you can’t be so near to them because that would make them feel that they are losing their territory, but you can’t be so far because then you wouldn’t see anything. So there has to be a balance between animals and humans so everybody is happy. That’s way I chose the Ying and Yang symbol as one of my images.

Image 5

• “He can’t be a Hindu, a Christian and a Muslim. It’s impossible. He must choose.” (p.69) My next image shows the three symbols of the three religions that Pi was practicing over a dark red frame that represents for me the controversy and fight that these three different religions were causing just because of the way that Pi expressed his ideals; “ All religions are true. I just want to love God.”

Image 6

• “Why enter this jungle of foreignness where everything is new, strange and difficult?..... People move in hope or a better life.” (p.77) My last image is a stamp of the American dream and I think this fits in that quote because that’s what happens with Colombian people when they decide to travel to U.S.A searching for a better life. They are not sure that this dream is really going to come true. people don’t think in that and they leave all the things they have including their families to make this dream a true.

Part one: Photo 1

• “I ordered two coffees. We introduce ourselves. His name was Francis Adirubassamy. “Please tell me your story,” I said.”(Authors note (x)) My first picture is a coffee because here is where the entire story comes from, and drinking a coffee is how the author starts writing the book thanks to Mamaji who told him about Piscine. Coffee is a drink that can give you a moment to talk with people and here in Colombia we use to drink coffee and talk about our lives with other people.

Photo 2

• “I was named after a swimming pool… One of my father’s earliest business contacts was Francis Adirubassamy. I called him Mamaji.”(p.8) My second picture is to a natural swimming pool and I chose it because the parents of Pi never took the water but the influence of a friend of the family who was a champion competitive swimmer gave him his name Piscine Molitor Patel and there is when the problem with the confusion of his name begins. I think that swimming pools are very fun because it’s a place where you have fun and train at the same time.

Photo 3

• “Mr. Satish Kumar, my biology teacher…had a most peculiar appearance. The top of his head was bald and pointy, yet he had the most impressive jowls, and his narrow shoulders gave way to a massive stomach that looked like the base of a mountain, except that the mountain stood in the air, for it stopped abruptly and disappeared horizontally into his pants.”(p.25) Mr. Kumar is a very important character in the book and a photo of my grandfather in reference of Mr. Kumar is what I chose because my grandfather fits exactly in his description. Also the picture was taken in a zoo while he was feeding an animal, just like the story.

Photo 4.

• “DO YOU KNOW WHICH IS THE MOST DANGEROUS ANIMAL IN THE ZOO?... it was a mirror.”(p.31) The next photo shows a human with a gun hunting and this picture corroborates what the zoo wanted to express with the mirror. Humans are the most dangerous animals in the zoo. We know this because we are responsible of what happens to animals and we are in charge of letting them be happy and live a life full of peace.

Photo 5

• “Tigers are very dangerous,” Father shouted. “I want you to understand that you are never under any circumstances allowed to touch a tiger, to pet a tiger, to put your hands through the bars of a cage, even to get close to a cage. Is that clear?” (p.34) For this quote I chose a photo of a sign in the cage of a tiger which says “trespassers will be eaten” and next to it the picture of a tiger looking. For me this picture shows some of the lesson that the father of Piscine gave him about how dangerous tigers are and that they won’t hesitate about eating your hand if you pass it through the bars. I think that we must respect animals and stay far of them so we wont danger.

Photo 6

• “He shows me family memorabilia. Wedding photos first. A Hindu wedding with Canada prominently on the edges. A younger him, a younger her.” (p.86) Finally for the last I choose a photo album picture and I select it because Piscine didn’t talk too much at the beginning about his family and wife but at this moment he opens his life in a memorabilia and shows everything about him to the author. Memorabilia is an excellent way to keep important moments of the present in the future. I have one in my house because we like that every time we want to remember something we just look the memorabilia.