Alfred de Tavares likes Pico Iyer. True, he is a good essayist and his work for Time magazine was good. But, you never know how the "raw" copy looked before the Time editors shaped it. I have read hisVideo Night in Kathmandu Nights, and many essays in periodicals. I think it was in The Global Soul....l that he wrote about Toronto as a fine example of a multicultural city. It is in this book he talks about the "mongrelization" of identities and culture. He noted somewhere that he is a product of the "mongrelization" of cultures as he of mixed breed, and as somone born in England and then lived in America, and now lives mostly in Japan, his Santa Barbara home often. He fell in love with an elderly Japanese woman who bore him two (I think) kids. Two of my acquaintances, then a pair, took him around the town. He hardly went to many sites and they were shocked that he wrote something entirely different.He obviously relied on some old written stuff. The lady, a visual artist, told me that she was shocked at his attitude and his journalistic integrity. She said she couldn't believe that he could give his impressions of the city. particularly its multicultural makeup, by staying in the city for a day or two. A good Indian essayist to read is the novelist Pankaj Mishra.
Eugene Correia
