'I Clutch My Hours To Me'

Pico Iyer has variously described himself as "a global village on two legs", and as "amongrel", one of a growing number of global souls who exist in many cultures at the same time. Born inEngland to Indian parents, he went to California when he was fairly young and was later educated at Eton andOxford. A former essayist for Time magazine, Pico Iyer has travelled to some of the remotest parts of theworld - places that are "falling off the map" - and has borne witness to emerging "globalcultures" and, equally, to striking income disparities.

His reflections find expression in his books - among them, Video Nights in Kathmandu (1988), TheLady and the Monk (1991), Falling Off the Map (1993), Cuba and the Night (1995) and TheGlobal Soul (2000) - which have won critical acclaim for "elevating travel reportage to newheights". His most recent work, Abandon(2003), is a thriller that is centred around an ancient Sufi manuscript; his next book, which will be out nextyear, is about his travels to some of the poorest places on earth "at a time when the US was basking in acocoon of delighted prosperity."

In this interview to V. Venkatesan, Pico Iyer reflects on the inequities of today's"us-versus-them" world. Excerpts:

As an observer of and commentator on the human condition in different parts of the world, what, in yourview, keeps some countries poor and others rich?

In financial terms, my sense is that the distribution of wealth, unequal as it is, is self-perpetuating,and, especially in a linked and accelerating world, the rich get ever more quickly richer while the poor getever more speedily poorer. Three American individuals famously have the same net worth as 48 whole nations ofthe world; and even within America itself, for all its prosperity and egalitarianism, one individual (BillGates) has the same net worth as perhaps 100 million others (themes I investigated closely in my book, TheGlobal Soul),

At the same time, I have always been inclined to see richness inwardly and to measure it by other means -and to wonder, as everyone from Mother Teresa and the Dalai Lama has done, why countries like the U.S., forall their material wealth, seem often so desperately impoverished within. If we want to talk about GrossNatural Product, we have to talk about the King of Bhutan's index of Gross National Happiness, too. CertainlyI have found, as many travellers before me, that people in the poorest places are often the readiest to showerme, from an affluent country, with hospitality and kindness. And as one who's been fortunate enough never tohave financial worries, I've been humbled and sobered to travel around a world where so many are living indesperate need, and reminded daily how lucky I am.

By way of example, I spent New Year's in 2002 in La Paz, Bolivia, feeling that at a time when so many werethinking and talking of war, in the wake of the attacks on New York and Washington, I would rather be in atown named for peace. And by some measures, Bolivia suffers from the worst rural poverty in the world, and thecentral slum surrounding La Paz is the fastest-growing city in South America, an all too literal stainspreading across the sunlit valley. But spending some weeks among the Bolivians, I did not come away with asense of poverty or even need, very often; indeed, their needs did not always seem more urgent than those ofthe people around me in affluent California. And their kindness and calm were a daily treasure.

As someone who's observed and commented upon various economic models, would you say, from your experience,there is any one model that delivers the merits of free enterprise without compromising on human values orgiving way to economic exploitation?

I think it's in human nature to want to have more, to compete with the other and, at some level, to be dissatisfiedif someone else has more than you. As they used famously to say in the Soviet Union, "Capitalism is theexploitation of man by man. Communism is the opposite." My experience, from observing various kinds ofsystems, is that systems themselves, all political entities, encourage the worst in man; but that individualsand humanity itself sometimes comes upon something better. The nature of a system is to encourage thinkingabout "us" and "them" (even if it's a system that preaches the equality of all beings);the nature of thinking and nuanced individuals is to think in terms of "us" being all butindistinguishable from "them."

You've recorded striking images of economic disparity during your travels - of conspicuous consumption as well as of abject poverty...

I spent a lot of time around Atlanta during and before the Olympic Games in 1996, and I'll never forgetstanding outside Martin Luther King's home on Auburn Avenue, listening to his great cries for brotherhood anduniversal responsibility while people all around me wandered, dazed, through a neighbourhood where most of theshops were boarded up and most of the windows shattered ("Freedom Walk Ends," said the sign on thepavement). There were no lines on the street, and there was absolutely no sense of society or order; and tenminutes' walk away, down the very same street, were visible the great towers of the global economy - aRitz-Carlton Hotel, a huge conference centre, a 71-storey Westin Hotel that is by some measures one of thetallest such structures in the world.

It seemed to me a poignant image of the way much of the world is going: a few sleek high-rises soaring intothe 21st century, and linked to global markets everywhere, and all around them a wasteland and a wilderness nobetter off than it might have been at the time of Jesus or the Buddha. At the time I was visiting, 43% ofAtlanta's children were living in poverty and 14,000 homes downtown lacked even telephones. And this wasduring a period of unprecedented prosperity for the U.S., by some measures the most affluent society historyhas ever seen, and at a time when all the billboards being erected for the Olympics were singing of universalbrotherhood and the global village. The poverty one still sees in America today is more shocking to me thananything I have seen in Ethiopia or Calcutta or Manila, and has made me, as someone living in a society ofgreat wealth and someone who's never had to worry about the next meal, think seriously about what universalresponsibility really means. If, at some level, we truly are living in a global neighbourhood, then we mustremember that our neighbours' problems are our own.

You have lived "in interesting times" in Japan: during a period of economic boom and, now, ofsevere economic decline.

The resilience, the determination and the stoicism of the Japanese are some of the qualities that drew methere, and from which I hope to learn.The economy in Japan has been unravelling for many years now, and yetyou see far fewer signs of desperation and decay than in the States, or in many more prosperous places. TheJapanese excel at keeping up appearances, putting a brave face on things, and taking hopefulness to be thefirst step to making the hopes come true (they are also guided by a deeply Buddhist sense of impermanence andthe reality of suffering). So in some ways they have taught me to think of "depression" differently,and to learn to construe it more subtly than I might in California.

I do not see many signs of economic panic or despair in Japan. People think more prudently about theirfutures - graduating college students, for example, more readily join the government now, because of somesense of job security there, and people take trips at home more than abroad. At the same time, the Japaneseare a famously prudent people with a great gift for savings, and a keen sense of the long term. As I'm sureyou know, there are no cheque-books in Japan, and until recently even credit cards were not in common use; theabsence of crime means that people think nothing of walking around with $2000 or more in their pockets. Thereis still a sense of trust in so unified and self-enclosed a society.

What has always impressed me about the Japanese is that they have so clear a sense of the differencebetween public and private responsibilities (and selves). To this day, most of the people I see in the streetsof Kyoto or Nara are very expensively dressed, and pouring in huge numbers into exorbitant boutiques ortea-rooms where they will pay 300 rupees for a cup of tea, however tiny and straitened their rooms behindclosed doors might be.

As a writer of travel literature (and, now, a work of fiction), your biggest "economic asset" isperhaps your "intellectual capital" - by which I mean the cumulative of 'knowledge', 'perspective',and a highly evolved literary skill. To that extent, do you feel you are better equipped to survive in what iswidely called today's Knowledge Economy?

Actually, no. I have never been on the World Wide Web, I have never used a cellphone, I don't makeinvestments and I live a very long way from the Knowledge Economy, I think (feeling that I have too muchinformation as it is, and I wish to live as far as possible from data, while also feeling, as someone whowants to see and understand the world, that I don't want to be screened in, and don't want to take it in atsecond-hand through the screens of computers or televisions).

To this day, therefore, I live in a two-room flat in rural Japan without a bicycle or car or television orprinter. I don't want my sense of a Knowledge Economy to obscure my interest in a Wisdom Economy, and Ibelieve that the ultimate luxury is being able to do without as much as possible. So while you're right tosuggest that a writer is potentially in a strong position in an economy in which information is prized, I am awriter who feels that information can obscure as much as it reveals, and that the quantity of knowledgeavailable today is a poor substitute for quality.

What are the significant money values that have shaped your life?

I have always considered, as suggested above, that the ultimate luxury is peace and quiet, and that theresources I most prize are invisible.In that respect my inspirations, since boyhood, have been Emerson andThoreau, especially, and such latter-day successors as Mahatma Gandhi and the Dalai Lama. So I have alwayslived relatively simply -- I have never owned a piece of property, I left my job with Time magazine inRockefeller Center in midtown Manhattan to live in a single room in a Kyoto guest-house with two toilets andtwo showers shared among fifteen residents, the car I drive in California today is a rickety bottom-of-theline 1995 Toyota without air-conditioning or power steering or even a mirror on the passenger side.

As a writer, of course, I'm not in a position to earn much money, and have to write at least sixty articlesa year just to pay the bills (the books I write are simply labours of love, since they make almost no money).But over and above this, I have always wanted to fill my head with something other than money, and so more orless keep my money in a savings account in the bank and regard it as something to think about as little aspossible.

As one who was educated in expensive private institutions - Eton, Oxford and Harvard - on scholarship, andas one who has been lucky enough to spend much of my adult life in places not notably affluent (Haiti,Cambodia and Tibet), I've been able to see both extremes of affluence and poverty. And I'm not alwayspersuaded the first are better off. That's why my next book, out next spring, is about travelling to some ofthe poorest places on earth (Yemen and Ethiopia and Bolivia and so on) at a time when the U.S. was basking ina cocoon of delighted prosperity.

In many ways, I think I'm the very opposite of a financially savvy individual; in financial terms, I'm likea three-year-old at best. Were I even to try to play the stock market, I would be confident in having theMidas touch in reverse. Although I studied economics intensively in school, I scarcely know the differencebetween a credit and a debit, and, to my embarrassment, cannot understand the simplest economic realities.

What do you consider your most valuable possession?

Time, without question. I have never cared much about money, and have never been in a position in which Ihave had to think about it very much, either because I have a lot or because I have very little. But I doconfess to being greedy with time, parsimonious in handing it out, miserly in hoarding it. My feeling is thatmoney, if lost, can always be got back (I can just work harder, and write one hundred articles a year insteadof sixty); but time, when lost, seems to me irretrievable. I clutch my hours to me, and spend much of my timeeither in a Catholic monastery or in rural Japan as a way to make the day last forever, and to feel that thereisn't a single moment of down time (no phone-calls, no errands to run, no distractions) in the day.

Fifteen years ago, I went over to Kyoto to live in a Zen temple for a year. I didn't really succeed in thatobjective, but when I returned to the California where all my things were, a forest fire came along anddestroyed the house and everything in it, with the result that I was swept entirely clean.The day after thefire, the only thing I had in the world was the toothbrush I had just bought in a supermarket (and, of course,my memories and friendships and beliefs--all my invisible assets).I've always regarded that fire as somethingof a blessing, both in showing me how perishable and fragile are all material things, and in reminding methat, even with no possessions, I have a life that 98% of the people on the planet would envy.