I seemed to have, grossly, missed the point somewhere during the play. Perhaps the contemporary spiritual tale about Buddha, jet lag, and airports was portrayed in too ‘contemporary’ a manner for my comprehension. I must confess though, to the excellent portrayal (as present-day travellers journeying together in an “Utopian non-place”), by the international cast comprising five performers from diverse cultures and different parts of the globe.

I still affirm that the play didn’t do justice to the captivatingly-written book of the same name (which is the reason I went to see the play).

The book, The Global Soul, by Pico Iyer is a different matter. To begin with I admire this writer’s, power of observation. The minute details he perceives, notes and transcribes for the reader make one realise how much we don’t ‘see’ of what is going on around us.

Iyer is also the TIME magazine correspondent, and an obvious product of today’s One World, which he attributes to his parents: …” supporting the consequences of my global lifestyle in ways I would not recognise till later, bestowing on me all the blessings of their various homes in Oxford, Bombay and California.” Globalism, Iyer defines, has become the convenient way of saying that the world’s a single market.

An inveterate globetrotter himself, Iyer takes us through numerous international locales, making each one equally fascinating. Familiar to many of us, are the Los Angeles International Airport – from where he branches out to other airports he has transited in; Cambridge and Oxford, the Olympic Games venues. He goes on to term sports as the great equalisier when he writes: ‘Whenever I wish to get an update on the state of our One World order – how much it is coming together, how much it is falling apart – I try to take myself to an Olympic Games.”

He illustrates how airports have become microcities where millions of people from all over the world congregate briefly, where a multitude of languages are spoken, and employment is provided for thousands.

And he offers us a peek into the not so familiar such as a friend’s home in Hong Kong. His host, a businessman, traverses the globe more than an average pilot does, stays connected with far-flung business associates, relatives and friends across the world by five phones, has a dozen international bank accounts.

The building he lives in has miniairport on the ground floor to check in for all Cathay flights; a Seibu department store; a bank – and an Immigration Office. The friend affirms: “You never have to leave the building.”

This writer brings a range of his contemporaries to life by describing his interaction with them at The Harbourfront Writers’ Festival in Toronto, easily the largest literary festival in the world, among other venues.

Most poignant is the opening chapter ‘The Burning House’, where, while describing the ravaging fire in such a poetic manner, you can sense the helplessness at his loss. Iyer, a victim too, offers us a glance into his parents’ home in California. Upon arriving at the gutted home the next day he notes: “All the props of my parents’ sixty years, all the notes and prospects I’d been collecting for fifteen years, all the photographs, memories – all the past – gone.”

The pages are studded with numerous appealing details and nuggets of information. For example, just take one city, Toronto. Iyer discovers the name of the city comes from an Iroquois word meaning ‘meeting place’. And his first encounter of the word ‘multiculturalism’ was while reading an essay of Jan Morris’s about Toronto, from 1984.

There are other noteworthy topics he touches on, but some more superficially than others, such as the Francophone issue in the French-Canadian province of Quebec which did result in many Anglophones living in Montreal to migrate west. But doesn’t he tend to sound an alarmist when he goes on to add: “So, ‘New Canadians’ from ... joined several other groups of fugitives who didn’t even show up on many charts:.. 300,000 Anglophile refugees from Montreal, in flight from Quebec’s violently anti-English language policies…”

Another time, he compares Singapore to countries with a “multicolored present [which] actually redeemed an unaccommodating past here, not by bureaucratically erasing it (as in Singapore), or turning it into a food court, but by offering unorchestrated cacophony.”

Iyer, many a reader might claim, ‘jumps’ from subject to subject – but that is deliberate and makes the book more interesting. In fact, the reader need not go through the chapters in a sequential order. You can choose to read a topic that interests you more than the others, and move on.

To sum up Pico Iyer’s must read for every intrepid or armchair traveller, his descriptions and innate sense of observation make you end up feeling – “been there, seen this, done that” - without actually being there.

This affirms that the word ‘foreign’ is not foreign any more.

The Global Soul
by Pico Iyer © 2000
Bloomsbury Publishing, London