The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai LamaPico Iyer
Viking, Rs 499
Pico Iyer offers a biographical meditation on the Dalai Lama, in a style that is as dispassionate as the monk himself

Our knowledge is a little island in a great ocean of non-knowledge.
— Isaac Bashevis Singer
The dalai lama shot back into the limelight with the recent Chinese crackdown on Tibetan demonstrators in Lhasa and neighbouring regions, which led to protests marring the relay of the Olympic torch for the Beijing Games. While the Chinese portrayed the Dalai Lama as almost a terrorist, the Tibetan leader’s legendary cool also showed signs of fraying. The whole episode brought into sharp relief the question of both Tibet’s future and the relevance of the Dalai Lama and his strategy. This makes Pico Iyer’s new book, The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, important, though it was completed before the Lhasa outbreak.

Iyer is a name to be reckoned with in travel writing, given his gift for recreating a place and atmosphere in magical prose. In this, his first non-travel book (though he’s not been able to entirely shake off his travel log even in the headline — “open road”, “global journey”), he considers the life and work of a man he has known for over 30 years, a friend of his father, the legendary scholar Raghavan Iyer, elucidator of Gandhi and translator of the Gita and Dhampada. What makes Open Road the single most important book on the Dalai Lama to be published is that Iyer eschews conventional biography and instead offers a biographical meditation. And Iyer reveals that rare quality of a biographer, the ability to be dispassionate and see both sides of a situation — a little like the Dalai Lama himself.

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