Pico Iyer: The Open Road

Recorded Live: Sunday, April 20, 2008, 9:30 am PST

G U E S T :

• Pico Iyer
  Author of nine books, his first, Video Night in Kathmandu (1988), has appeared on many lists of the top travel-books of all time.

Moderated by : The Very Rev. Alan Jones,
Dean of Grace Cathedral

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About the Program:

Pico Iyer has been engaged in conversation with the Dalai Lama (a friend of his father’s) for the last three decades—an ongoing exploration of his message and its effectiveness. Now, in his insightful, impassioned book, Iyer captures the paradoxes of the Dalai Lama’s position: though he has brought the ideas of Tibet to world attention, Tibet itself is being remade as a Chinese province; though he was born in one of the remotest, least developed places on earth, he has become a champion of globalism and technology. He is a religious leader who warns against being needlessly distracted by religion; a Tibetan head of state who suggests that exile from Tibet can be an opportunity; an incarnation of a Tibetan god who stresses his everyday humanity. Moving from Dharamsala, India—the seat of the Tibetan government-in-exile—to Lhasa, Tibet, to venues in the West, where the Dalai Lama’s pragmatism, rigor, and scholarship are sometimes lost on an audience yearning for mystical visions, The Open Road illuminates the hidden life, the transforming ideas, and the daily challenges of a global icon.

Pico Iyer is the author of nine books: his first, Video Night in Kathmandu (1988), has appeared on many lists of the top travel-books of all time. He writes regular cover-stories on literature in The New York Review of Books, on globalism for Harper’s, and on world affairs for Time magazine. In 1995 Iyer was named by the Utne Reader, along with Noam Chomsky and Vaclav Havel, as one of 100 visionaries worldwide who "could change your life."