Zoo of Pi

This is one of the tigers in Kerala's Trivandrum Zoo. It's name is probably not Richard Parker. But Richard Parker is the name of the tiger in the award-winning novel (and brilliant award-winning film), Life of Pi . If you haven't seen it, do.

Trivandrum Zoo is said to be the one that inspired the novel, in which the protagonist, Pi, was brought up in a small private zoo in South India. He later found himself drifting across an ocean with a tiger, a hyena, a zebra, and an orangutan for company. Eventually there's only the tiger (and Pi) left. The story explores ideas in epistemology, theology, ethics, the lot. And it's brilliant.

It was quite a good zoo by Asian standards. Some quite large enclosures, though some animals were rather too caged. I'll rephrase that. All cages are bad news, and in the case of the flying birds, they're outrageous. Zoos are probably not a good idea anyway, in this day and age. But lots of them, unfortunately, are worse than this one.

I kept finding that what was attracting my eye most (and my camera's too) were the animals of the human kind. So colourful are the people of India that I couldn't stop myself making them the subject of my pictures!

The poor caged white tiger was a sad but similarly photogenic subject though.

I watched the film for a second time on the flight home from India, and as is often the case with clever stories like this, I got a much better understanding of what it was all about.