Tomorrow the Chinese New Year begins, and the third zodiac animal is everywhere on merchandise, from accessories and cosmetics to clothing and watches, in celebrating the Year of the Tiger.
Also saluting the big cat, we recall the greatest tiger characters of all time, such as Hobbes, Rajah, Shere Khan and Tigger, to name a few.
The most intriguing tiger character is perhaps the castaway Richard Parker in Life Of Pi. The inspiration for the philosophical novel came when Yann Martel was in India, whose national animal is the Panthera tigris — the largest member of the cat family.
However, when the Canadian author began working on Life Of Pi, it took him some time to get to the Bengal tiger. Martel initially thought of an elephant and then a rhinoceros but the problem with the latter is that the herbivore would unlikely survive 227 days at sea.
The…
