My take…
Pico Iyer has been a delightful and an absolutely wonderful find for me and am glad having found this hidden treasure. Hope to read all of the other books by Iyer as well soon...
Ten years back - this book would not have made much sense to me. I'm glad I have read it late in life.....after my international assignments/travel started rather than earlier. Also I think people who have done good amount of travel away from 'home' would appreciate many aspects of this book better.
Looking at my kids and my life in the last decade - can see that this 'global souls' issue is becoming a bigger slice of our lives given the frenetic Globalisation that is a norm in today’s world.
Despite the individual backgrounds and cultures, all of the Global-Souls seem to face the same set of situations which pose hard questions of 'Where am I ?' , 'Where am I from?' and the eventual ‘Who am I’ facet of conversations that nonchalantly keep plucking at raw chords in the jangled frame of a Global-Soul.
The connectedness brings to mind a wonderful movie ‘Babel’ in which also there are different types of worlds and cultures are getting knocked down as they get enmeshed into others. However this book is about the disconnectedness that comes with the Global Soul – it is about the dreams, of displacement, of being lost within a labyrinth of impersonal spaces and gives some readings of how this shaking of the planet felt and looked at ground level to a typical global villager, admittedly a privileged global soul, making his way through a scrambled world and sorts through the confusion of ‘’post-denominational’’ temples and self-created traditions.
The book puts in perspective the sense of 'global souls' in us. I feel the Author as well as his friends quoted are at the extreme end in terms of cross-cultural-upbringing, global-travel and pace. My own travel travails seem quite trivial in comparison. This book is centered around ''keeping the souls intact in the face of pell-mell globalism''. Iyer is a self-acknowledged ‘previleged global-soul’ because of growing up simultaneously in three cultures, none of them fully owned, growing up without any relatives in the same continent, without learning the mother-tongues (different) of his parents, born to Hindu-born Theosophists - educated entirely in Christian schools - spending most time in Buddhist lands, ''a no-wherian falling between all categories'': ‘’A wanderer from birth, I chose to live a long way from the place I was born, the country in which I work, and the land to which my face abd blood assign me – on a distant island where I cant read any of the signs and I will never be accepted as even a partial native’’. This is a book on global-souls in terms of their dreams, of disconnection, of displacement, of being lost within a labyrinth of impersonal spaces.
Other than this 'Global-Soul' aspect, the book is also a very interesting read due to some punchy quotes and informative discussions. For example the author gives his take on a few of my favorite authors (VS Naipaul, Kazuo Ishiguro, Michael Ondaatje) and it is an enjoyable and absolutely insightful summary. Also the author beautifully weaves the ‘Global Soul’ theme into (a topic that interests me a lot) the quest by the immigrant-soul trying to come to grips with:
- their motherland-culture (dearer now because of the separation perhaps),
- their ambitious intellectual destination (that they had fallen in love with and ‘’arrived in life’’ at last) in the foreign lands (only to find it a mirage), and
- the culture they are actually living-in the foreign lands (which is neither here nor there – but is a fast-forward into another age and era )
The global village has given more and more of us the chance to move among the foreign, and so to simplify and clarify ourselves in this way; being in so strange an environment is the first step towards living more slowly, and trying to clear some space, away from a world ever more revved up. In our global urban context, its an equivalent to living in the wilderness.
Iyer feels ‘as the world order spins, ever more intensely, so, too, do our dreams, and almost any immigrant who arrives today at the place he’s hoped for will find it’s become somewhere else’. The 'global' we so readily attach to every product we wish to make seem desirable stuck a less happy note when it came to 'global hearts' and 'global loyalties'. From the profiles of Iyer, his friends and the increasingly globalised world - it seems inevitable that nationalities will become more and more subjugated to international interests. Arundhati Roy's speech of WE seems less disturbing given this 'globalisation' trend. Although as pointed out in the book itself, this 'global soul' issue even today concerns a tiny minority while for the majority the issues remain: how to get food on the table, find shelter for children, how to live beyond tomorrow: 'While we worry about email and trans-provincialism, two thirds of the people in the world have never used a telephone' (must be true a decade back when this book was written!).
The book begins with Iyer’s house along with the rest of the mountainside are turned to ‘smoking ash gray sea’ by a forest fire and he (who referred himself as an Indian born in England and moving to California as a boy, with no real base of operations or property even in his thirties) had really become homeless. A few weeks later just when the final touches are being made to the new house (in the spirit of California – which is a society built on quicksand, where everyone is getting new lives every day), an earthquake in California which shook the foundations of the neighborhood. A few months later, huge rains came down and sent whole parts of the slope underneath the house sliding towards the city below.
Having lost his house to the fire, Iyer begins his journey for home and makes this quest the subject of this book:
- LA International Airport (LAX) which was part of many of his journeys since childhood and starts to see it in a totally new light
- to an elite friend in Hong Kong which offers a secured and independent lifestyle at a price and gives an overview of the City from that perspective
- to Toronto, Canada and draws comfort from the city’s cosmopolitan culture and is amused with its self-rebuking attitude
- visits Atlanta for covering the Olympic games and paints us a vivid picture of the soul-less city but gives a good portrayal of the games and its effect on its host cities
- of England which seems to struggle with comprehending its place in the modern world where it draws little clout
- of his home in Kyoto, Japan where he finally finds solace and home despite being in an alien culture, language and traditions as he realizes that only here he can be himself and with himself without any pressure, pretentions nor apprehensions.
Since his childhood, Iyer finds an Airplane as a kind of enchanted limbo in which he is treated as a de facto VIP and where there are no rules or expectations – neither of parents at home in US, nor of the strict matrons at Oxford Boarding school. He also gives a detailed background of the thrill ( ), emotions , weird (fatigue, jet-lag, costumes, mannerisms of people from different nations), Security (FBI, Security agencies, CIA everyone is here……I could be Under Cover, you could be Under Cover – who knows?), Insecurity (repeated announcements to take care of belongings, not to accept food from strangers, that it is not required to give money to solicitors and the airport does not sponsor their activities, ….). Iyer notices that most airports have become more than international convenience zones, and are actually models of the future built on the assumption that everyone is from somewhere else, and so in need of something he can recognize to make him feel at home; it becomes therefore an anthology of generic spaces offering comforts of home, made impersonal – the shopping mall, the food court, the hotel lobby and of modern-ills: fast food, transit lounges amidst the beeps of Mortal Kombat machines and props of motels. The air is conditioned and the plants are false!
Iyer starts taking account of the Global soul from the start-and-end point of the modern Traveller i.e. an Airport. And went to live for a while at LAX where people most come to make new lives (California receives half of America’s immigrants) and is quipped as ‘’you change planes at LAX even when you are dead’’.
LAX, however, is unlikely to thrill people who have dreamed of it from afar. It is a flat and centre-less mess with no real defining principle of heart – just a mass of gray, gray terminals around a central international building that is no longer large enough to accommodate all international arrivals. Eight satellites, you could say, in search of a sun. Also Iyer gives a detailed account of the various organizations (Charities, Hotels, Restaurants, Night Clubs, Travel Agencies) and people (Spies, Students, Travelers of different nationalities) that inhabit the Airport and how the entire mix somehow makes the Airport as well as the City (LA) itself a disappointment for a very expectant Visitor (backdrop of: beaches and bikinis and palm trees and sun, Baywatch lifestyle, ET) and rather like grandfather’s science fiction nightmare (Encounter Restaurent in the centre of the city having waiters in Star Trek influenced uniforms).
Hong Kong
For outsiders the perpetual colony is increasingly an empire of capital where economics trumped all ideologies and less of its earlier ‘capital of empire’ Victorian outpost status. Hong Kong is a multicultural mishmash made up of generations of migrated British, Chinese who poured in after the ascent of Mao making this the fastest-rising city in history and which is more importantly for them free of politics, Filipinos for whom it was a job-market unimaginable at home and for Vietnamese who fled here on boats (first fleeing war and later seeking affluence). It is also a very cosmopolitan city that can provide the elite International Settlers with a global marketplace untouched by the 99% Chinese population.
England
The one thing the convent educated Indians were not prepared for, surely, was an England made up of Islamic fundamentalists, and of HareRamaHareKrishna settlements like Glastonbury, and where the humble Curry is the most popular national dish. Iyer also finds only some old people when he visits Leeds to watch an International Cricket match on one summer’s day. But only from these old people could Iyer gather the England he had grown up with and also from the famously articulate Old Etonian announcer who was murmuring like a tributary of Thames about ‘handsome strokes’, ‘cultivated cricketers’ and shots pulled out ‘like a silk handkerchief being removed from a top pocket’.
Iyer writes about Gandhi (dreaming of becoming an upstanding English barrister, and schooling himself in French and dancing lessons and dandyish fashions) and Nelson Mandela (named after Admiral Nelson no less, combining in his person ‘’the perfect English gentleman and the tribal chieftain’’). Writes that in these stories, the pattern was always the same: the young foreigner mastered the ways of British so fully that he was perfectly equipped to undo them, armed with ‘’nothing more than the finest tradition of self-criticism taught in British schools’’ (as said by Michael Manly – the Prime Minister of Jamaica)
Iyer quotes:
- Tagore from 1878 ‘’Before I came to England, I supposed it was such a small Island and its inhabitants were so devoted to higher culture that from one end to the other it would resound with the strains of Tennysons’ lyre’’
- glimpses of other Empire romantics like Salman Rushdie (could afford to turn his back on England because he’d grown up there) , Kazuo Ishiguro (even as the Britain around him was exploding, was writing of a soft, prewar England of stiff upper lip), Nirad Chaudhuri (Autobiography of an Unknown Indian – dedicated to ‘’the memory of British Empire in India’’), Hanif Kureishi and Romesh Gunasekera
- A character in Maugham ‘’It’s only we who live away from England who really love it’’
- Jawaharlal Nehru ‘’I have been a queer mixture of the East and West, out of place everywhere, at home nowhere…..I cannot be of the (West). But in my own country, also, sometimes, I have an exile’s feeling.’’
- An Indian friend bemoaning ‘’The thing is I admire the idea of England, but I can’t stand the reality. I always thought that England meant fairness and free choice and all that kind of thing, that this was the center of decency. And now, of course, I find I’m much more English than the English. The only true English people you will now find are born abroad – maybe because they share our romance of England and don’t know the reality. I suppose I miss an England that is built on elegance and love of language and love of literature, instead of money.’’
Iyer hears these as the sound of a lover disappointed, a boy who’s left everything he knows to pursue some ideal, unattainable woman, and arrives at her doorstep, only to find that she’s given herself over to some mobster from Las Vagas.
Iyer gives a gist of VS Naipauls’ Enigma of Arrival : which replaces the ‘idea of decay - the idea of the ideal which can be the cause of so much grief’ (expressed in all above quotes) with ‘the idea of flux’. The British Empire has given way to the American and then the International one, as the classic colonial refugee has given way to the Global Soul, what was a binary relationship is now a multi-pronged, spraying out into every direction at once.
Iyer feels that if some of us feel nostalgic for childhood, for all its limitations, that is mostly because we long for a time when days could be eternities and the mind would be where the body is and quotes: ‘To an English-born outsider like myself, the spicing of England was all to the good – the island has grown stronger and darker, like a mug of lukewarm water left to steep in 2 million Indian (and West Indian) tea bags’
Altlanta and Olympics
Iyer bares the Olympics & draws out all its glory, myth and internals. In the backdrop of Atlanta Olympics, he also paints the character of the city and also draws parallels with other Olympic cities. He elaborates about the history and present situation of Atlanta being the Coca-Cola city in so many ways and about how it seemed that more and more that the soft-drink company owned not just the city but the whole event.
A tenth of the world got its news from Atlanta (CNN – the largest news-gathering organization of the world)), 195 countries got their soft-drink from the city (Coca-Cola – the wrold’s most famous trademark), HQ of the largest hotel chain both in name and in reality in the world (Holiday Inn), Home base of UPS, Hub of Delta, was to soon claim the busiest airport (Even when you dies, you change planes at Atlanta). All these superlatives could not turn bigness to greatness. Being global and being central were very different things. Atlanta’s problem, Iyer surmises, was that it had plenty of global reach and almost no global clout.
Atlanta was sometimes referred to as a ‘’forest in search of a city’’. To Iyer, the choice of Izzy confirmed his suspicion that Atlanta had little sense of what the world expected of it: it was a small town’s idea of what a big city should be. Atlanta did not know what it was exactly – even what it wanted to be – and so had ended up as a model of the aspiring city at the end of the millennium, high rise office blocks coming up at its center, a futuristic web of terminals surrounded for as far as the eye could see by untamed wilderness. A ‘’ghost of a city’’ with an absence of character and weight built around a corporate ‘’void space’’ of the atrium. A mix of ‘Northern charm and Southern efficiency’ in JFK’s unforgiving put-down.
To Iyer it looked mostly like a small-time innocent done up in a three-piece suit and whose very identity is caught up in the outlines of the rags-to-riches stories of local heroes who had conquered impossible odds to make an impact on the world: Jimmy Carter (the country boy who had walked all the way from a peanut farm to the White House), Alonzo Herndon (founder-president of Atlanta Life Insurance had started life as a half-black slave – the owner of a barbershop), Herman Cain (the head of Godfather Pizza, had been born to a black chauffeur, who drove Coca-Cola chairman Robert Woodruff around), Ted Turner, Henry Aaron and Martin Luther King. Atlanta regularly reminded visitors that it was the ‘’Capital of the New South’’ and Iyer recalls that the term the New South had been coined in 1886.
Iyer reveals many amusing aspects of the games and some of the items I liked are:
- in the hammer throw, a man called Kiss beat a man called Deal
- the strongest Kenyan runner is not in evidence because he’s in the process of becoming a Dane
- people of the outline of Atlanta wearing EX-WIFE FOR SALE base-ball caps and T-Shirts that said JESUS EXPRESS: DON’T LEAVE HOME WITHOUT HIM
- Jews handing out pamphlets saying, ‘Its not too late to shot-put your sins and triple-jump to Jesus’
- ‘I never saw peanuts in a bag before’ cried someone, waving a five-dollar tomahawk in the face of a startled blonde
- Someone was saying ‘you are so dumb, you tried to change the channel on a TV Dinner’
- Sermon from Arnold Schwarzenegger ‘Where would I be without sports?’ ….'On a farm in Austria’
- A sign reading ‘GLOBAL BURGERS (Think Globally, Eat Locally)’
- Olympic preparation starts with a visit or two to the Olympic City a few months before the local government tells its citizens to smile at foreigners, its taxi drivers to say ‘’Have a nice day!’’ and its restaurateurs to stop serving dog;
Toronto feels to Iyer a lot like the above book in that it does not seem to have a ground Zero from which everything is measured; Slice Toronto along one north-south artery, and you will find a seething, spicy, uncategorisable something best described by the Little China restaurant, which advertised ‘’Indian Pakistani-style Chinese food’’. Slice it further along and you’d find pure white Highland shortbread. The city:
- has all New York’s intelligence, without the sourness; and all of London’s sophistication, without the sourness
- has a sense of tempered idealism – and optimism made rigorous by irony
- has all the Manhattan’s software, without its hard drive
Japan
About the travel possibilities in today’s world, and the broken language barriers of today ('a hundred cultures divided by a common language') - Iyer feels the world is more divided today than ever in part because of the illusions of closeness.
Iyer lives in a two room apartment in the middle of rural Japan and is familiar with only the immediate vicinity covered during his daily walks. However for him it feels like home in incidental ways of being able to tell when the trees in the park are going to change color, when vending machines will be change their offerings from hot to iced, and when the children will change their uniform from blue to as he is by now conversant about when to expect weather changes based on
Japan has a lot of built up props based on Western cities/movies (for ex. A nearby coffee shop, above an artificial lake, called Casablanca that contained the very piano that Dooley Wilson played for Humphrey Bogart) that may at one level seem synthetic and one dimensional like the more popular cities of NY and HK for ex. Japan’s response to globalism is a promiscuous mix-n-match at will consumption of all cultures of the world like from a souvenir show, but only at the level of their surfaces – and all of them converted into something very Japanese.
Iyer finds the Japanese to be less apologetic about embracing artifice and plastic replicas and have few qualms about modeling their lives on the Spielberg sets they have seen on-screen. Japanese however keep foreigners at a distance and gets on with its own business while offering politeness and punctuality without fail, and requests in return that they accept their fixed roles in the bright, cheerful pageant that is official life here.
On the surface Japan is an alien place, but under the surface it speaks the language of Iyer with its uni-culture with firm distinctions and clear boundaries that enforce simplicity: the changeless universe of the outlines and emotions, the codes and silences, the force of the things unsaid in the neighborhood are like the protected England of Iyer’s Old World childhood home which he readily identifies more than the words. It is touching to read about how ‘’every time a cashier presents me with my change, she cups my palm tenderly to receive the coins’’. It is these invisible things that feel home for Iyer in this alien place where public life strives to be generic and individuality flowers behind closed doors: ‘’the most peaceful place on earth is among strangers’’.
Quotations
The book is liberally interspersed with innumerable quotations and it is only some of them that I reproduce herewith:
- Nelson Mandela - 'Is Globalism only going to benefit the powerful? Does it offer nothing to men, women and children ravaged by the violence of poverty?'
- Kofi Annan - reminded us that 'quarter of the human race seemed condemned to starvation'
- Hosni Mubarak - 'Our global village has caught fire, from where we do not know. We have to put out some of the flames....but we do not know where to begin rebuilding.'
- Muammar Gaddafi - 'Village is peaceful, clean and friendly; everyone knows everyone else. There is no theft in a village. The city is just a biological worm in which humans live and die without perspective, without patience.....The city kills social instincts and human feelings.'
- His Holiness The Dalai lama - 'If we try to unify the faiths of the world into one religion, we will also lose many of the qualities and richnesses of each particular tradition'; indeed, for a westerner to practice Tibetan Buddhism, he said - given that the discipline grew up in response to a culture and environment very different of the west - is as strange as putting a 'yak's head on a sheep’s body'
- Edith Cavell - ‘Patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred or bitterness for anyone’
- Carl Lewis – ‘These days there are only two things that draw Americans together – the Olympic Games and war’
- Wole Soyinka – ‘I am a writer and therefore an explorer. My immediate tribe remains the tribe of explorers’
- Simone Weil in her Book L’Enracinement (‘The Need for Roots’): ‘No human being should be deprived of his metaxu, that is to say, of those relative and mixed blessings (home, country, tradition, cultures etc) which warm and nourish the soul and without which, short of sainthood, a humanlife is not possible’
Iyer relates to ‘’The Global Soul’’ in terms of the theme of this wonderful book and also gives a wonderful summary of the book which is refreshing and so good to read:
Ondaatje is a poet – meticulous in his details – and the whole book is a vision of this new order, an ‘’Oasis Society’’. The most radical thing about the people in the book is, quite simply, that they are not hybrid beings so much as post-national ones – the place they were born or grew up is as irrelevant to who they are as the color of their socks. Nearly all the main characters are actively involved in escaping their names, their pasts, their seeming nationalities – and in seeking a new kind of order as in a desert, where tribes meet and join and fall apart. And the places where they live, as floating bodies, are mostly temporary: a monastery, a cave, a lover’s heart. ‘’All I desired was to walk upon such an earth that had no maps’’. The book does not have a central figure, certainly no point of orientation. Sitting above all provincialisms – and privatizing even the most famous conflict among empires – it dares to suggest a ‘’New Age’’ in which people can live with a nomad’s (or a monk’s) freedom from attachments.
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