Globalism

"For many years now, globalism has been seen only in the context of markets and technologies, data and good flying around the world with unprecedented speed. But people are being propelled around the globe as never before, too, and more and more of them have parts of themselves in many different cultures. How does a new kind of global imagination arise out of the 21st century life-style, and what new forms of relationship and affiliation and community and self are coming into being? How do we consciously construct a new kind of global dreaming and, more fundamentally, a planetary conscience?

Globalism is creating a new kind of being, one who is in a position to choose his or her sense of tradition, of loyalty, of religion and of home as never before. But with these new choices come new kinds of challenges. How can the so-called global soul turn the unfamiliar, but fundamental, conditions of his life to advantage, and alchemize out of our newly linked world a new and revolutionary kind of life?"

 

Bio: Pico Iyer once described himself as "a global village on two legs." It's a fitting appellation for someone born in England to Indian parents, immigrated to California as a boy, was later educated at Eton and Oxford , and now spends much of his time in Japan .

"I am simply a fairly typical product of a movable sensibility," he says, "living and working in a world that is itself increasingly small and increasingly mongrel. I am a multinational soul on a multinational globe on which more and more countries are as polyglot and restless as airports. Taking planes seems as natural to me as picking up the phone or going to school; I fold up my self and carry it around as if it were an overnight bag."

A longtime essayist, and the author of four books, Iyer is one of the most eloquent and incisive observers of the new cultural mix that characterizes today's borderless world. His writing moves from travel reportage to social criticism to philosophical rumination, always with a keen eye for odd juxtapositions. Whether he is speaking German to a tipsy police chief i Cuba , eating enchiladas in Nepal , or reading a Jackie Collins novel at a public library in Bhutan , his world is one where the foreign and the familiar always coexist in unexpected ways.