I travelled last week through New Zealand with Pico Iyer in my head. I was reading his latest book“The Man Within My Head” to prepare for my interview with him at the Singapore Writers Festival and I couldn’t have picked a better companion.

From his first breakthrough book 27 years ago, “Video Nights in Kathmandu”, Pico Iyer’s stories have lent texture and context to my own travels. His is a different kind of travel writing – he confesses he’s a lousy writer of travel guides such as where to stay and what to eat and see – and so I don’t read him for that purpose.

I read him for his take on places and people, and his views on life and life’s questions. His is a unique perspective borne out of a wandering and wondering life. Born in the UK of Indian parents, he was educated in Britain, lived in California and now lives in Nara, Japan.

And his latest book, a reflection on Graham Greene, his father and himself, is as honest a portrayal of his life and his thoughts as I’ve encountered. It’s actually rather clever – he bares his soul using the two screens of Greene and his father – must be the Japanese influence of silkscreens, where what’s hidden is more revealing than what’s told.

In the live interview at the Singapore Art Museum (see picture below), he confesses to being at home everywhere and nowhere – the epitome of “a global soul”, the subject of another of his books.

In “The Man Within My Head”, he writes, “a physical location is unimportant so long as you live among values and assumptions that strike you as your own – or the ones you’d like to learn” and “home lies in the things you carry with you everywhere and not the ones that tie you down”.

Asked therefore if the notion of nationality was outmoded in today’s world where there are lots of global souls – about 250 million of them, according to Iyer, people like him who are not living where they are born – he agreed and said people should not be defined by the soil on which they are born but by their soul.

“We should be defined by our interests – a fan of Graham Greene, for instance – rather than by where we are born,” he said.

It’s a theory I’ve long believed should be applied to travel – that we shouldn’t look at our customers by country of residence but by interests. It is when we put people into boxes like China or India that we fear them because we think we cannot understand them but if we define people by their interests, it is then that we find more commonalities than differences.

One reason why Iyer loves to travel is that it humbles yet inspires. In his book, he writes, “I always loved being alone – and as long as I was loose in the world, unaccompanied, I was never bored or at a loss. Freed from my usual routine and small talk, I was away from the sense that I had to play a role, or to choose one self over another; I could find out what lay at the heart of me, my core, and so bring back something clearer and more rounded to the people I loved.”

Asked which place had the biggest impact on him, he said Tibet which he visited more than two decades ago and he deliberately limited his time there to four days because he didn’t want to dilute the intensity of the experience.

He sees travel as humbling and believes kids, the minute they leave university, should travel. Kids in Singapore should go to places like Ethiopia or Kathmandu. “You live in a gated community here, you need to go see what other places are like in the world.”

For him, Cuba is the most humbling place. You think you understand everything and you go to Cuba and it shatters every notion of what you think you know, he says.

Personally, he doesn’t believe his eight years reading literature made him a better writer. If anything, he wishes    he had used those eight years to travel and learn about life.

Iyer also believes in discipline and responsibility as the basis for freedom rather than freedom as the basis of everything. As a child, he craved for discipline and structure which is why at the age of nine, when his parents moved to the US, he decided he wanted to return to boarding school in the UK – a period he describes as “the happiest period in my life”.

You must have discipline before you can be creative, he says. And so he writes everything down in a little notebook he carries. The other thing he carries with him everywhere is Graham Greene’s “The Quiet American”.

Not many people too would draw parallels between the author Graham Greene and the Dalai Lama (of whom Iyer has also written in “The Open Road”) but Iyer does in his latest book.

Both men share qualities which Iyer admires – kindness, selflessness and self-awareness – and he writes about Greene, “He really did appear to hold that kindness is more important than conventional morality and the things we do more telling than merely the things we claim to believe.”

Travel too has not lost its mystery and element of discovery for Iyer despite the advances of technology. It is up to each of us to determine how much we wish technology to influence our lives. Iyer confesses to being a Luddite and still uses the fax machine and occasionally uses email. He goes to a Benedictine monastery once a year to seek silence.

Writes Iyer in “The Man Within My Head”, “I turned to writing because it offered few escape routes or hiding places – it’s harder to lie to yourself on the page than in the world. But of course living with words had moved me to trust most those moments that come only when words run out.”

So when have words run out for him, I asked? His reply – moments of deep love, faith and sheer terror.

And so it is in silence which we must learn to trust – where what’s not said is more important than what’s said and that is certainly true of “The Man Within My Head”.

I had to read deep between the lines of what Iyer was trying to tell me and the silence and solitude of New Zealand – “a natural monastery”, as he calls it – was the perfect backdrop.

* Thank you, Pamela Ho, for picture of event at Singapore Writers Festival