01 February,2009 05:35 PM IST | | Saaz Aggarwal
Pico Iyer, who recently wrote a book on Tibet's spiritual leader, is brilliantly articulate, relaxed and charming. He is also welcoming of anyone who approaches him. One of the most respected travel writers alive today, he attended the Jaipur Literature Festival as both speaker and involved participant Pico Iyer at the Jaipur Literature Festival Pic/ Saaz Aggarwal
Tell us about your connection with India.
It's that of a fascinated foreigner. I'm a hundred per cent Indian by blood but I've never had a chance to spend enough time here. In the last few years I've been coming almost once a year. It's a revelation of a country I don't know well enough, and of parts of myself that I hadn't seen before.
I've spent all of the last six springs in Dharamsala, working on my recent book, The Open Road about the Dalai Lama.
Your parents are Indians?
Yes, my father's from South India and my mother's from Gujarat. They grew up in Bombay but left at a young age to study at Oxford so they spent the majority of their years outside India. I never heard an Indian language spoken because the only common language between my parents was English. That's part of my past that I would love to reclaim.
How will you do that?
I just made my first trip to Varanasi, an important thing to see as one epicenter of Hindu India, and I've just been making strategic forays into different parts of India to add to the geography inside my head.
You're best known as a travel writer. Tell us something about travel writing.
I think that the best travel book is one that doesn't resemble a typical travel book.
The Open Road is travel seen through the eyes of the Dalai Lama who has traveled more than all the Dalai Lama's of history put together, and is the most visible traveler in the world. He is always traveling with a reason: to see what he can learn from any place, and to see what he can give to any place. As someone who's traveled a lot myself, it's taught me how travel can be a constructive, compassionate kind of activity, not just an indulgence.
What's always been interesting to me is the shifting nature of home, of exile, of cultures crossing, and that was another thing that I was trying to get at through one of the most conspicuous exiles in the world.
Something about Dharamsala?
In some ways it's a microcosm of what I've written about since my first book: those places where East meets West, each projecting certain romances and expectations on the other.
In my first book Video Night in Kathmandu, I experienced Kathmandu as a place where many Nepali people are dreaming of going to Santa Monica or London or Frankfurt. And people from those places are dreaming of finding enlightenment in the Himalayas.
Dharamsala is also exciting because it's where the Dalai Lama has taken Tibet as it used to be and created a sort of Tibet 2.1, a more enlightened and modern and connected community than before.
It represents a beautiful possibility for all of us who are displaced and that's more and more of the world.
What do you think of the changes in India over the past few years?
People in India are excited about what's new here. But for me, growing up in Britain and America with an overdose of the new, a large part of what India has to offer is continuity, changelessness, and the depth of its roots.
One new phenomenon in India is the return of Buddhism. The Buddha came from India, somewhat departed, and now thanks to Tibet has come back.
Your parents were academically brilliant. Did you ever have the pressure that a lot of young Indian children have to excel and to take certain courses?
Well my parents are both philosophers. So that's different from being doctors or engineers! I owe a great debt to them for never really imposing their will, and for giving me the freedom to follow any path I thought wise or suitable to me. When I was 9, they allowed me to go to boarding school 6,000 miles away from where we lived.
England was home, and when I was 7 we moved to California, which felt like the opposite of home!
It was their way of saying that I had the freedom to listen to influences other than theirs, and to be moulded by teachers and classmates and friends. That's a great generosity that they extended.
Was it not difficult to adapt?
It was the early sixties, and I was the only Indian in all my classes. And I was the only one who couldn't see that I looked different! I'd been born and grown up entirely in England, and felt no different from anyone else.
I'd grown up on the same streets and gone to the same shops.
But you're right, it was a difficult time. There was a great false tidal wave in England against the new immigrants from Pakistan and India. I do remember feeling a little scared as I walked down the streets alone in a sea of sometimes quite hostile white British people.
It was a good training for the world and I learnt the virtue of being thrown into difficult circumstances. It would have been more comfortable if I'd grown up in my parents' home but then when I went out at 18 I'd have been undefended before the world!
Your philosopher parents could afford to send you to Eton?
Interestingly, such was the financial state of the world then that it was cheaper for me to fly back three times a year to see my parents than to go to the private school 10 minutes away from our house in California!
My parents didn't have very much money but I was their only child and they made great financial sacrifices and used some of their savings to give me the best education.
I remember reading your byline in Time Magazine in the early 80s and thinking wow, he's Indian and he's made it!
Thank you! I don't know if I've made it to this day, actually.
I joined Time in 1982 when I was 25, and in those days one would hardly see an Indian, even in New York. I was ahead of the influx of big Indian entrants to America. I've never encountered racial prejudice in the US. It was harder for me to subsequently live off being a writer because that's not a very lucrative profession.
I did give up my quite comfortable job in the middle of Manhattan to go and live in a small monastery in the back streets of Kyoto, where I've lived since.
The Lady and the Monk ends quite abruptly, with the reader thinking that maybe I just went away. But in real life I was more sensible, I married her! We're very happy together though we don't speak each other's languages well.
Your advice to someone who wants to make a living out of travel writing?
Anyone who wants to be a travel writer should do just what I did which is, write up your holidays, write for anyone who asks you, even if it's unpaid. If my local grocery store or supermarket had a newsletter, I'd write for that! And I would write and just send long letters to my parents and my friends.
I'd volunteer to write articles free for the local newspaper. Every time I took a holiday I'd write an unsolicited piece that no one was interested in running. Then for two subsequent summers when I was in graduate school, I went around Europe writing guide books it was very difficult and paid next to nothing.
But when someone from Time magazine came to my university looking for a person to hire, I had all these clips to show. And even though they were from grocery stores rather than the New Yorker, somebody could judge what I could do and couldn't do.
Your personal learning from the Dalai Lama?
My connection to His Holiness goes back to the time my father came to India to interview him. I was three years old, and he sent me a present a photograph of himself when he was first enthroned at age 5. I kept it with me always and in my childhood when I felt lonely or unhappy, the thought of this child with all his responsibility towards an entire displaced people brought me comfort and courage.
In the last 35 years I've spent many wonderful hours in conversation with the Dalai Lama and what little I know I probably learnt from him. He's been the spiritual and temporal head of his people for 69 years, and is the most selfless, clear-sighted and experienced political leader.
He has seen his people's problems as opportunities for learning and growth. I've learnt to do this too and it's helped me a great deal.
I'd say to aspiring writers just turn to the wisest people around you and see what concrete advice they offer and assume that they know more than you do!
