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Business News/ Mint-lounge / ‘Indians are born multiculturalists’
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‘Indians are born multiculturalists’

‘Indians are born multiculturalists’

Tibet is the main backdrop of his latest book on the Dalai Lama (Photo by: Teh Eng Koon / AFP)Premium

Tibet is the main backdrop of his latest book on the Dalai Lama (Photo by: Teh Eng Koon / AFP)

In the two decades since the publication of his first book, Video Night in Kathmandu, Pico Iyer has produced a body of work so influential that for most people he is the first name that comes to mind when they think of travel writing. Born in England to parents from India, brought up in California, educated at Oxford and Harvard, and now for many years a resident of Japan, Iyer personifies the vast revolution in the self-image of much of humanity in the last 50 years. Increasingly, our cultural allegiances are multiple, the reach and frequency of our journeys wider, our relationship to the word “home" drastically different. And to understand the new self within this new globalism, thousands of readers have turned to Iyer. His new book, The Open Road, a biography of the Dalai Lama, appeared this summer. In this interview, Iyer talks about the book, travel writing in general, what he admires about Marcel Proust and musician Leonard Cohen, and about Indians and travel. Edited excerpts:

Your new book on the Dalai Lama has many interesting insights on religion, politics, globalism, and on the balancing act of upholding tradition while embracing change. Am I correct in my understanding that these are as much the themes of your own work as they are of the Dalai Lama’s life?

Tibet is the main backdrop of his latest book on the Dalai Lama (Photo by: Teh Eng Koon / AFP)

To make a move from Buddhist “mindfulness" to the travel writer’s art: How important is it for a travel writer to be able to live in the present—to inhabit the moment fully and pick up sensory detail in an intense way? Or would you say this aspect of travel writing is diminishing in importance in the age of Discovery and Travel and Living?

I would say that this aspect of writing is diminishing in the age of information. When I first visited Tibet, in 1985, I felt that few of my friends and neighbours could ever dream of seeing Lhasa, so my job was to absorb as much of its smells and spices and faces and sounds as possible, to bring back to them. By the time I made my third trip there, in 2002, it seemed to me that most people who might read my books could see parts of Tibet I could never visit on some website, or could walk around the Potala Palace on the Discovery Channel. The one thing that writing could do that no new media could touch was to try to catch the inner Tibet, the discussion inside oneself about how much to believe and how much to distrust, the constant dissolve between realism and dream-state that high altitude, culture shock and jet lag bring on.

Iyer is based in Tokyo and New York

So, a lot of travel writing is about the traveller?

No writer can pretend to give you the ‘true’ India, let us say; all she can offer is her version of India, her particular discussion with it, her sometimes inspired and sometimes insipid take on it. Travel, after all, is a conversation, and every traveller only gets as much from his journey as he brings to it. The reason people read Naipaul on India or Africa is that he is trying, with such poignancy and intensity, to sort out the India, the Africa and the Britain in himself; it’s the hauntedness he brings to the places he visits, the questions that shiver inside him, the uncertainties he hopes to resolve there that give his works a power and passion that most travellers can’t match. Likewise, when you read W.G. Sebald, you read him not for his descriptions of Venice or East Anglia, but in spite of them—and because he is always at some level running from his legacy (as one born in Germany in 1944) and running into nothing more than the perplexity of having been born in Germany in 1944.

Jan Morris in Trieste, Orhan Pamuk on Istanbul, Joseph Brodsky on Venice—all the great writers on place are great because of the unsettledness they bring with them, and the intensity of their concerns.

On one’s travels, one encounters not just other cultures but also hundreds of other travellers. Are Indians good travellers? Do you find from your experience that Indian tourists are in any way different from other ones?

Iyer visited Nepal for his first book, Video Night in Kathmandu (Photo by: Gopal Chitrakar / Reuters

What is the best travel book you have read recently? And which is your favourite travel book from before the revolution in travel in the 20th century?

A Crime So Monstrous, by the young American writer Benjamin Skinner, tracing the realities of human trafficking from Haiti to India, does what every great book about place should do: opens the eyes, shakes the conscience and lights up those corners of the world that few of us would dare to inspect first-hand. A truly global work, it shows us the realities that underlie many of our casual pleasures, and reminds us of those truths that affect far more people than (those who) travel on holiday around the globe. After reading it, you cannot look at that red-light street in Romania, or that smiling face in Cambodia, in the same way.

As for classic books, all my books have been written, as readers probably know too well, in the shadow and light of Emerson and Thoreau (who enjoy first word and last in my most recent book, and who offer the epigraphs to at least three other of my works). So, it’s no secret, I fear, that my favourite book of travel is Thoreau’s Walden, which takes us around the world, while never moving more than a mile and a half from its author’s home, which reminds us that true travel takes place in the descrying of new ideas and the entertaining of new horizons—and which asks us, unblushingly, “Why go around the world to count the cats in Zanzibar?" Insofar as travel is really about transformation—the only reason ever to leave home—Emerson and Thoreau remind us that the truest and deepest journeys can indeed be found while walking around one’s backyard.

Lastly, what three things would you absolutely want to take with you on any journey?

A good book—Greene, Mistry, Lawrence, Roth—some medicines, and a sense of humour.

**************

WORLD TOUR

Our pick of the best from Pico Iyer’s oeuvre

Video Night in Kathmandu (1988)

This is Iyer’s first travel book. It chronicles an exuberant trip through a great sweep of Asian countries, and is often found on lists of travel classics.

Falling off the Map (1993)

Essays on journeys to places that are isolated not so much geographically as culturally, such as North Korea, Cuba and Australia.

The Global Soul (2000)

The title of this book sounds like the central theme of Iyer’s work, and among the many delightful things in it are essays on the unromantic aspects of travel, such as, jet lag and shopping malls.

Sun after Dark: Flights into the Foreign (2004)

A miscellany of travel essays, profiles and book reviews, including meditations on the writer W.G. Sebald and the musician Leonard Cohen.

Write to lounge@livemint.com

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Published: 19 Jul 2008, 12:06 AM IST
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