Pico Iyer got used to being called an “American writer living in Japan,” but also “an Indian writer living in America.”
He was born in England, actually, of Indian parents who took him to California as a boy; he took himself to Japan. He identifies himself now with the roughly one million people who cross international borders every day, the universal disapora, guest workers, boat people, marielitos, Rwandans in New Zealand, Moroccans in Iceland, permanent exiles, offshore no-wherians pining for home in the airports and malls of a Global City.
“One reason why Melbourne looks ever more like Houston,” he writes, “is that both of them are filling up with Vietnamese pho cafes; and computer technology further encourages us to believe that the remotest point is just a click away.”
What if that fading sense of being rooted is an urgent need of the human soul? The troubled “Global Soul” of Pico Iyer – in this hour of The Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)
Guests:
Travel writer Pico Iyer and his book, “The Global Soul: Jet Lag, Shopping Malls, and the Search for Home.”