The Global Soul: Jet Lag, Shopping Malls and the Search for Home [Paperback]

This is one of the most fascinating books that I've read in recent years. I picked it up the other day and started leafing through it again, and found myself immersed once more. Iyer is a fascinating character - a travel writer and foreign affairs journalist with Time magazine - and is uniquely qualified to talk about globalisation and its effect on individual lives. Born into a family of Indian academics who moved from India to Oxford, he was brought up in England and educated at Eton, Oxford and later Harvard. He subsequently became an American citizen and at the time of the writing of the book was living in Japan. The book has the feel of an amble through the realities of modern life - full of insight and thought-provoking comments, describing a world that more and more of its citizens recognise from first-hand experience. While the cliche of a world that is constantly getting smaller is demonstrable true, we too easily forget the various costs this has on quality of life, at the jet-set and sweat-shop ends.

The simplest thing is probably to quote from various points to give a flavour:

"For more and more people, then, the world is coming to resemble a diaspora, filled with new kinds of beings... as well as new kinds of realities: Rwandans in Auckland and Moroccans in Iceland. One reason why Melbourne looks ever more like Houston is that both of them are filling up with Vietnamese PHO cafés; and computer technology further encourages us to believe that the remotest point is just a click away. Everywhere is so made up of everywhere else - a polycentric anagram - that I hardly notice I'm sitting in a Parisian café just outside Chinatown (in San Francisco), talking to a Mexican-American friend about biculturalism while a Haitian woman stops off to congratulate him on a piece he's just delivered on TV on St Patrick's Day. `I know all about those Irish nuns,' she says in a thick patois, as we sip our Earl Grey tea near signs that say CITY OF HONG KONG, EMPRESS OF CHINA." (The Global Soul, p11)

"In 1996, the entire Canadian 4×100 relay team came from the West Indies (and was competing, of course, against other teams from Britain, France and Trinidad, full of West Indians); Mark McKoy, a Guyana-born, English-bred product of Canada (living in Monaco with his German wife), was somehow running for Austria. And China's age-old supremacy in table tennis was being challenged only because the US, Canada, Great Britain, Japan and Austria (again) were all being led by Chinese players." (The Global Soul, p209-210)

The diaspora effect of globalisation definitely has its dark side though:

"The UNHCR, formed as a temporary agency in 1951 to deal with the refugee emergence in Europe at the end of the War, had received mandate after mandate to keep going. It now had offices in 115 countries, and the number of refugees, just 2.5 million in 1970, was up to 27.4 million, having doubled in just the past 8 years. Refugees, a UNHCR official told TIME, `are one of the growth industries of the '90s.'" (The Global Soul, p110)

Not to mention the economic impact of globalisation:

"Of all the bodies on the planet, multinationals have the greatest stake - quite literally an investment - in telling us that the world is one (and Everyman, therefore a potential consumer). CNN, part of the new media conglomerate for which I work - the largest such in the world - forbids the use of the word FOREIGN on its broadcasts, and IBM, aiming, like most companies, to be local everywhere, tells us in reassuring tones, `Somehow the word FOREIGN seems foreign these days.' Globalism has become the convenient way of saying that all the world's a single market." (The Global Soul, p14)

Perhaps one of the most explicit examples of this is the recent campaign for HSBC - the so-called `world's local bank'. I remember when they took over the Midland Bank in the UK and issued a command to their employees never to refer to themselves as the Hong Kong Shanghai Banking Corporation any more but just HSBC because that would make it too rooted in a particular culture. Many today probably have no idea what HSBC stands for - which i guess suits the company just fine.

"Indeed, one of the most troubling features of the globalism we celebrate is that the so-called linking of the planet has, in fact, intensified the distance between people: the richest 358 people in the world, by UN calculations, have a financial worth as great as that of 2.3 billion others, and even in the United States, the prosperous home of egalitarianism, the most wired man in the land (Bill Gates) has a net worth larger than that of 40% of the country's households, or perhaps 100 million of his compatriots combined (according to Robert Reich). The rich have the sense that they can go anywhere tomorrow, while 95% of the new beings on the planet are among the poor; I worry about the effects of E-mail and transprovincialism, while 2/3 of the people in the world have never used a telephone." (The Global Soul, p26)

What particularly strikes me in all this is that, for all the breaking down of barriers and homogenization that globalisation has brought, those caught up in it have become strangely dislocated; those who feel most threatened by it then batten down the hatches and try to preserve their cultures by keeping isolated from the rest of the world. So it seems that Babel is still a reality - it's as if global unity is an inbuilt impossibility. Is there hope - well as a member of an international, incredibly diverse, global body of the most surprising network of all, i would say there is - a body launched 2 millennia ago in a dramatic reversal of Babel.

Being a "global soul" myself, I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book and I recommend it to anyone who has wondered what "home" means in our fast-moving shrinking world, in which cultures merge and international living and travelling has become a way of life.

In a language that reflects the dizzy pace of the ever-changing modern world, the author takes us on a soul-searching journey of the meaning of "home" by drawing on his personal experience and observations. As a man of Indian origin who grew up in the UK and the USA, who lives in Japan by choice and spends most of his life travelling, he is more than well-placed to do so. In this search, he takes us from international airports to the Olympic Games and from Toronto via the British Empire to his adopted home in Japan, exploring the new cross-roads of cultures of modern living in a world that is rapidly becoming a melting pot and in which any traditional assumptions and securities about "home" are fast crumbling. Entertaining, startling, reflective, this book is both an inner and an outer trip accross the world that leaves the reader enough space to come to his or her own conclusions as to what "home" is in this new way of living - not least through some very well-chosen quotes at the beginning of the book and of each chapter (e.g. Huston Smith at the beginning of the chapter entitled the "Alien home": "Daily the world grows smaller, leaving understanding the only place where peace can find a home").

I believe that anyone with a mixed cultural background or who has experienced extensive international exposure - or for that matter anyone wondering about our shrinking planet - will be enriched by the observations and reflections in this book.

This intriguing book has been around for a few years, but remains one of the few to tackle the impact of globalisation on our day to day lives. We may be ready to criticise the 'reach' of corporations (Starbucks, Nike, McDonald's et al), and some of these complaints are justified. But isn't it great to arrive in some far-flung Asian capital and be able to grab a coffee just like home? Come on, you KNOW its true :)