The film opens in Canada, where a writer is interviewing Pi Patel, a native of Pondicherry (now Puducherry), India.

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In 1993 labor unrest in Communist-dominated Kerala sent Ramachandran scurrying to Pondicherry to take advantage of the tax holiday offered there.

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Their examples of fulfilment and violence contend with more traditional ones, like that of his father, a widower who spends his life in joyless service to the state and retires to an ashram in the former French colony of Pondicherry, there to renounce the snares of this world.

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