Indian actor Suraj Sharma, who starred in Taiwanese director Ang Lee’s (李安) 3D adventure epic Life of Pi, began a nine-day trip to Taiwan yesterday for sightseeing and to visit friends he made during the shooting of the movie, most of which was done in Taiwan.
Describing himself as “super-excited,” Sharma said he has been yearning to revisit Taiwan since his previous trips to the country to promote the movie because his busy schedule during those trips kept him from having fun.
Accompanied by his younger brother, the 20-year-old will visit Taipei and Greater Taichung, where Life of Pi was shot.
Besides reunions with friends, Sharma said he would try to visit places he has been to and try more Taiwanese cuisine.
Having just finished his second movie, Million Dollar Arm, a film based on a true story in which he plays baseball pitcher Rinku Singh, Sharma said that after he wraps up his visit to Taiwan, he will depart for New York University to study film and psychology.
He will be following in the footsteps of Lee, who is also a graduate of the university’s film production program. Sharma said it was Lee who inspired him to study movies.
A modest Sharma said he does not expect himself to reach the same career heights as Lee, but simply wants to understand and enjoy the experience of film production.
Life of Pi, which was adapted from Canadian novelist Yann Martel’s 2002 Man Booker Prize-winning novel of the same name, won four Oscars this year, including best director.
Sharma plays the lead character Pi Patel who is stranded on a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger after a shipwreck.
Kenting National Park service technician Yang Jien-fon (楊政峰) won a silver award in World Grand Prix Photography Awards Spring Season for his photograph of two male rat snakes intertwined in combat. Yang’s colleagues at Kenting National Park said he is a master of nature photography who has been held back by his job in civil service. The awards accept entries in all four seasons across six categories: architectural and urban photography, black-and-white and fine art photography, commercial and fashion photography, documentary and people photography, nature and experimental photography, and mobile photography. Awards are ranked according to scores and divided into platinum, gold and
More than half of the bamboo vipers captured in Tainan in the past few years were found in the city’s Sinhua District (新化), while other districts had smaller catches or none at all. Every year, Tainan captures about 6,000 snakes which have made their way into people’s homes. Of the six major venomous snakes in Taiwan, the cobra, the many-banded krait, the brown-spotted pit viper and the bamboo viper are the most frequently captured. The high concentration of bamboo vipers captured in Sinhua District is puzzling. Tainan Agriculture Bureau Forestry and Nature Conservation Division head Chu Chien-ming (朱健明) earlier this week said that the
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