Children are like wonderful Russian novels that go on forever.
Yann Martel on his thrilling Indian experience
Haimanti Mukherjee, TNN Oct 23, 2012, 12.00AM IST
Man Booker Prize winner and the writer of Life of Pi, Yann Martel, tells us why religion matters even in a schismatic world like ours, and about the "wonderful, horrible" place called India
Canadian novelist Yann Martel talks exclusively to Bombay Times ahead of the release of the film Life of Pi, adapted from his 2002 Man Booker Prize-winning book of the same name. He tells us how a couple of backpacking trips to India changed his life forever.
Excerpts...
US President Barack Obama wrote a hand-written letter to you saying "Life of Pi is an elegant proof of God and the power of storytelling"...
That was a thrill. I send a 101 books to my (Canadian) Prime Minister and he ( Stephen Harper) never wrote back to me. He never wrote me an individual letter. And here, I have the President of the United States, and I'm not even American. I was thrilled, I was delighted.
Why do you keep on sending books to your PM?
I think a world leader who does not read, or want to know about the other — by which I mean an experience or a life very different from his — would have a blinkered vision. Fiction is the best way to explore the other.
Considering you've known India for some time, what book would you ask Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to read?
The Death of Ivan Ilyich, by Leo Tolstoy. It's the story of an ordinary man. And those stories are always most powerful. The protagonist, Ivan Ilyich, gets sick and slowly starts to die. The book's on how he reacts to his death, the reaction of people around him. It's funny, entertaining, deep, sad, and you totally believe it. I would send out that
for Mr Singh.
What has India taught you?
Oh God! India has taught me so many things; it is a wild, crazy, horrible, wonderful place. It's given the world Mahatma Gandhi, ashrams, the idea of a guru, it's given us wonderful food, beautiful way of dressing, extraordinary geography, stunning architecture, a diversity of language, I am idealising Hinduism here but there is something amazingly tolerant about it. Because of Hinduism, there are so many millions of Gods, and the Gods do not bother anyone. That's why so many religions thrive there. So many religions don't thrive in Europe because they are much more intolerant. Christianity is much more exclusive. Also, it's the largest functional democracy in the world. And at the same time, it's also a horrible place — it's got poverty, it's corrupt. But you know, India lies in one place at one moment, that's what I love about the country.
You've talked about always wanting children...
If you ask me, those are the best books I've ever written — my children. Lola is 16 months old and Theo is three years old and we (he and his wife Alice Kuipers) have another baby due in April. Children are like wonderful Russian novels that go on forever.
The Western world has a way of making people too rational and mechanical. Did your trip to India made you believe in religion, the mystical?
I studied philosophy in the University, which in the West, is guaranteed to make you an agnostic. The first thing you do when you study philosophy is fake half truths about God, and these truths don't work. It's very hard to be a believer in the study of western philosophy. I was very much a secular, materialist Westerner when I got to India in my mid-30s, for the second time. In Canada, religion is marginalised, it's only at the edge of things. In India, for better or for worse, religion is still a part of the mainstream. You see temples, mosques, and churches.... You see symbols of religion, you see religious behaviour. Intellectually, I started asking myself open-minded questions, like what does it mean to have faith in visions? That was sort of a bidding process of writing Life of Pi.
Did you ever think Life of Pi could be turned into a movie?
Well, it was a very difficult story to film. It's a complex book, but they had a wonderful director behind it ( Ang Lee), a great studio, who had the money and the means to pull the most difficult and bizarre scenes off. The film is very faithful to the book and it's visually sumptuous.
Why did you choose the name Pi Patel?
In mathematics, Pi is an irrational number which means it's a number that goes on forever. Yet it's constant in science, so we use this irrational number to get to the rational understanding. It's that contradiction that I liked. To me, religion is like that — an irrational number, it doesn't make sense on its own, but it helps make sense of the worl
Yann Martel on his thrilling Indian experience
Haimanti Mukherjee, TNN Oct 23, 2012, 12.00AM IST
Man Booker Prize winner and the writer of Life of Pi, Yann Martel, tells us why religion matters even in a schismatic world like ours, and about the "wonderful, horrible" place called India
Canadian novelist Yann Martel talks exclusively to Bombay Times ahead of the release of the film Life of Pi, adapted from his 2002 Man Booker Prize-winning book of the same name. He tells us how a couple of backpacking trips to India changed his life forever.
Excerpts...
US President Barack Obama wrote a hand-written letter to you saying "Life of Pi is an elegant proof of God and the power of storytelling"...
That was a thrill. I send a 101 books to my (Canadian) Prime Minister and he ( Stephen Harper) never wrote back to me. He never wrote me an individual letter. And here, I have the President of the United States, and I'm not even American. I was thrilled, I was delighted.
Why do you keep on sending books to your PM?
I think a world leader who does not read, or want to know about the other — by which I mean an experience or a life very different from his — would have a blinkered vision. Fiction is the best way to explore the other.
Considering you've known India for some time, what book would you ask Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to read?
The Death of Ivan Ilyich, by Leo Tolstoy. It's the story of an ordinary man. And those stories are always most powerful. The protagonist, Ivan Ilyich, gets sick and slowly starts to die. The book's on how he reacts to his death, the reaction of people around him. It's funny, entertaining, deep, sad, and you totally believe it. I would send out that
for Mr Singh.
What has India taught you?
Oh God! India has taught me so many things; it is a wild, crazy, horrible, wonderful place. It's given the world Mahatma Gandhi, ashrams, the idea of a guru, it's given us wonderful food, beautiful way of dressing, extraordinary geography, stunning architecture, a diversity of language, I am idealising Hinduism here but there is something amazingly tolerant about it. Because of Hinduism, there are so many millions of Gods, and the Gods do not bother anyone. That's why so many religions thrive there. So many religions don't thrive in Europe because they are much more intolerant. Christianity is much more exclusive. Also, it's the largest functional democracy in the world. And at the same time, it's also a horrible place — it's got poverty, it's corrupt. But you know, India lies in one place at one moment, that's what I love about the country.
You've talked about always wanting children...
If you ask me, those are the best books I've ever written — my children. Lola is 16 months old and Theo is three years old and we (he and his wife Alice Kuipers) have another baby due in April. Children are like wonderful Russian novels that go on forever.
The Western world has a way of making people too rational and mechanical. Did your trip to India made you believe in religion, the mystical?
I studied philosophy in the University, which in the West, is guaranteed to make you an agnostic. The first thing you do when you study philosophy is fake half truths about God, and these truths don't work. It's very hard to be a believer in the study of western philosophy. I was very much a secular, materialist Westerner when I got to India in my mid-30s, for the second time. In Canada, religion is marginalised, it's only at the edge of things. In India, for better or for worse, religion is still a part of the mainstream. You see temples, mosques, and churches.... You see symbols of religion, you see religious behaviour. Intellectually, I started asking myself open-minded questions, like what does it mean to have faith in visions? That was sort of a bidding process of writing Life of Pi.
Did you ever think Life of Pi could be turned into a movie?
Well, it was a very difficult story to film. It's a complex book, but they had a wonderful director behind it ( Ang Lee), a great studio, who had the money and the means to pull the most difficult and bizarre scenes off. The film is very faithful to the book and it's visually sumptuous.
Why did you choose the name Pi Patel?
In mathematics, Pi is an irrational number which means it's a number that goes on forever. Yet it's constant in science, so we use this irrational number to get to the rational understanding. It's that contradiction that I liked. To me, religion is like that — an irrational number, it doesn't make sense on its own, but it helps make sense of the worl
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