The Global Soul

Five years ago Pico Iyer's house burnt down.

While most of us would have been examining the small print in our insurance policies, the incident provided Iyer with the catalyst to examine the knotty question of just what and where he could call home.

For someone who describes himself as a "global village on two legs", "home" can be something of a slippery concept. Born in England 43 years ago to Indian parents, Iyer spent the first 20-odd years of his life shuttling between England and California and the next traversing the world for Time magazine as a travel writer, exploring the cultural impact of a world of collapsing borders and blurring identities.

Iyer is also an acclaimed author whose previous books on Cuba and Japan prompted William Boyd to describe him as the finest travel writer of his generation.

In his latest book, The Global Soul, Iyer argues that huge advances in travel and technology have created more and more people who - - like him - are comfortable juggling a number of different cultures. A typical "global soul" could be a Londoner, for example, who e-mails a German friend while eating Thai food with his Indian girlfriend who is reading the latest novel from a Japanese writer.

What fascinates Iyer is how this dizzying degree of cultural interfacing affects our sense of home. "Having grown up with three cultures simultaneously," he says, talking from his home in Japan, "of which none was fully my own, I have always felt homeless. Later when I began travelling, the question kept returning: who are we when there is no one around?" That philosophical question was given greater urgency by the fire which consumed his Santa Barbara home and destroyed a lifetime of photographs, letters and mementoes. "That forced me to realise that my house was more than the four walls where I spent my nights," he recalls. "It also reinforced in me the idea that I have a snail's sense of home: something small and portable I carry with me.'

But even a snail leaves a trail. Iyer's begins in post-independence Bombay where his parents met as college students. Because his mother was from northern India and his father from the south his parents could only communicate with each other in English: to his embarrassment Iyer is still unable to speak an Indian language.

After moving to England in the early Fifties, Iyer's parents - both philosophy lecturers - emigrated to California when young Pico was seven. Iyer recalls that his most vivid childhood memories are of, "saying goodbye to my parents in California and getting on a plane to go to Eton. I would be leaving behind a shiny synthetic world for a place where we would wear morning dress to chapel and we'd be beaten for stepping out of line." After Eton, Iyer studied English at Oxford and went on to graduate school at Harvard, where he worked on a series of guidebooks. It was, he says, excellent training.

He joined Time in 1982 as a staff writer but after three years with the magazine took a leave of absence to explore Asia in greater depth. That trip produced Video Night in Kathmandu - a series of meditations on his travels through Bali, Tibet, Nepal, China, India and Japan. "The biggest downside of travelling as much as I did," he says "is that because you have to be chameleon-like, adapting and reacting the whole time, you lose your sense of self."

It's a dilemma as old as the Bible. The New Testament asks "What shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world and lose his soul?" But with the world moving faster than internet shares on a trading screen, the danger of slipping into the void of indistinctness is greater than ever. "If you constantly hop from one culture to another," Iyer warns, "there is always the risk of falling in-between the cracks."

In the week I was reading The Global Soul, 58 Chinese immigrants were found dead in the back of a Dover lorry: casualties of the trade in human traffic. For Iyer they too are characters in the same story. "There is a small privileged elite," he explains, "and they enjoy globalism in the idealised sense. But at the same time there are a huge number of people who are borderless in a more anguished way. But the people flying in business class have little sense of how the people travelling in refrigerated trucks are living."