Camosun College Insight Speaker Series presents: PICO IYER

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Monday, May 17th, 2010
7:30 PM

Each year Camosun College presents the dynamic and inspirational Insight Speaker Series giving Victoria audiences the opportunity to interact with world renowned experts who offer insights to a wide variety of global and community topics.
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"Defining Culture and the Place We Call Home"

Travel writer, cultural reporter and author of The Open Road: the Global Journey of the Dalai Lama, Pico Iyer is renowned for his contributions to Time, Conde Nast Traveler and Harpers magazines. Educated at Eton, Oxford and Harvard, Iyer has spent the last three decades engaged in conversation with the Dalai Lama (a friend of his father’s)—a continuing exploration of his message and its effectiveness. Now, in The Open Road, Iyer captures the paradoxes of the Dalai Lama’s position: though he has brought the ideas of Tibet to world attention, Tibet itself is being remade as a Chinese province; though he was born in one of the most remote, least developed places on earth, he has become a champion of globalism and technology. He is a religious leader who warns against being needlessly distracted by religion; a Tibetan head of state who suggests that exile from Tibet can be an opportunity; an incarnation of a Tibetan god who stresses his everyday humanity. Moving from Dharamsala, India—the seat of the Tibetan government-in-exile—to Lhasa, Tibet, to venues in the West where the Dalai Lama’s pragmatism, rigour, and scholarship are sometimes lost on an audience yearning for mystical visions, The Open Road illuminates the hidden life, the transforming ideas, and the daily challenges of a global icon.