| Chris - 6/14/2015 07:12
Did I miss something about the main characters name? There is a scene where PI writes pi to some far out decimal point at school one day. Did he get his name from that event?
His father named him "Piscine Molitor Patel," that's where he got his "Pi" nickname. The Piscine Molitor was the kind of ultimate swimming pool in Paris at the time, in the typical Art déco (decorative architecture) design of the early 1900 of some buildings like hotels and palaces (New York's Chrysler building is one example). Pi's father had fond memories of this swimming pool and the posh and elegant people frequenting it, or images in his mind about it, as I am not sure he ever traveled to Paris in the original book by French Canadian author Yann Martel. But it is possible Patel's father visited Paris, as the Indian town of Pondicherry where Patel was born and the zoo located used to be a French colony.
Patel initially shortened his "Piscine Molitor" name because his schoolmates mispronounced it "pissing" for fun, so maybe he wrote the sequence of pi as a way to invent a new credible story for his nickname and put some distance with his previous name?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piscine_Molitor
Quite a convoluted story for the name, but the book and movie are excellent. |
Life of PI
