By Uttara Choudhury
NEW YORK – Inveterate traveller Pico Iyer cast a spell on his restless Manhattan audience by taking them on a spiritual journey.
He radiated jet-lag defying alertness and admitted to feeling free of that “chattering self” as he had just spent two gloriously still weeks in Dharamsala soaking up the atmosphere for his next book on the Tibetan God King, the Dalai Lama. “There have been lots and lots of dramas in my life — people have tried to commit suicide in my room; my house burnt down and I have had members of my family lose their mind but I don’t have anything to say about that. Nothing in those experiences really touched me deeply,” said Iyer.
“And yet I will suddenly remember walking along the seafront on a morning when nothing was moving in 1987 or remember the Tibetan monks chanting in the background with light coming in through a high window in a small room in Dharamsala. I think of writing as clearing the wilderness. Before I began writing, I really did not know the things that were important to me,” added Iyer who has written eight impressive books.
Iyer, who has been hailed by critics as a man who “seems to have been everywhere, seen everything and talked to everyone” has also stumbled on what is important to him. “I am finishing a book on the Dalai Lama but it won’t be out for two more years. I have written a great chunk of it but I still have to do the final part. It is looking at how the Dalai Lama will have changed our lives; given some people have never met him. It is looking to the future when the Dalai Lama is not alive — How he will have changed people’s thinking in a proactive way,” Iyer told DNA on the sidelines of a talk on a subject as esoteric and baffling as “The Shifting Self: Impermanence and the Things that Last.”
“I have been spending a lot of time in Dharamsala. I have been going there for over 30 years. I’ll go back to India in a few weeks. But the Dalai Lama keeps travelling so much — I went all the way to Dharamsala last month and he was in California so I didn’t get to see him. He is a hard man to keep up with,” smiled Iyer who has seen more of the world than most intrepid travellers; conducting thoughtful explorations of Oman, Bolivia, Tibet, Japan and Cambodia.
Iyer’s new book will now take off from where he left off in one of his earlier books where he played with the concept of exile by writing an essay on two high-profile exiles: the singer Leonard Cohen, who has withdrawn to a Buddhist monastery outside Los Angeles and the Dalai Lama who juggles the demands of his refugee subjects with the stresses of worldwide fame.
Iyer’s says his book is a tribute to a man who is remarkable in “big and small ways.” “The Dalai Lama does not see his refugee status as something to be glum about. He even sees exile as an opportunity to bring about positive change. You feel good just by seeing him. He never forgets faces. He will see you here in the Asia Society and turn around 20 years later and say – ‘Didn’t I see you in New York.’ He is just so down to earth,” said Iyer.
Born of Indian parents, Iyer was raised back and forth between England and the United States, educated at Oxford and Harvard. He now lives in a modest two-bedroom suburban flat in Japan without the intrusions of television and the Internet when he is not visiting some remote and far-flung corner of the earth. “But as a journalist and writer I do manage to get out,” said Iyer.
