He has been a keen observer of the world around us, giving us a glimpse of life in isolated Korea and troubled Kathmandu, has taken us to Paraguay and Ethiopia and Easter Island and Tibet too.

He has written about the loneliest places (Falling off the Map), and on Cuba and its revolution, Kyoto and its brand of Buddhism.

Anybody who has read Pico Iyer knows how he loves a journey ? he is the outsider looking in. But nothing quite prepares you for this brilliant consideration of the life and work of the 14th Dalai Lama. Iyer has been talking to the Dalai Lama for the last three decades, after being introduced to him by his scholar father, the Tamil philosopher Raghavan N Iyer, and that shows in this insightful study that doesn?t refrain from asking some hard questions, highlighting the paradoxes the Tibetan icon faces.

Iyer, for instance, wonders whether this global soul asks a difficult question again and again: how has non-violence helped his cause?

Though the book was written before the latest co nfrontation between the Chinese and Tibetans in Tibet, Iyer?s book is prescient in that it shows the difficult position the Dalai Lama is in. For example, though the Dalai Lama has made the world sit up and take notice of the Tibet issue, Tibet itself is being redrawn as a Chinese province.

In fact, this is a question that is at the back of the Dalai Lama?s mind as well. Iyer tells us how the day after he bagged the Nobel Prize, the Dalai Lama told him: ?I really wonder if my efforts are enough?. All we can do is try, even though it sometimes seems to be in vain.? It?s been an incredible journey for the Dalai Lama who travelled out of his mud-and-stone village to a kingdom which had no road linking it to the outside world even in the 1950s, ?and then right into the heart of the 21st century whirlwind?. The book refrains from projecting the Dalai Lama as god, something he will approve of ? ?? he isn?t always able to be what his people ask of him. He?s human.?

The Dalai Lama, in fact, points out Iyer, always takes pains to tell people he is no more than an experimenter. ?By speaking, as he often did, of a ?path?, he was saying, in effect, that we could always go further, that everything was in a state of flux and that all he was doing was showing the way so that others could take it in new directions.?

After watching him for decades, Iyer concludes that the Dalai Lama is a religious leader who ?counsels a practical realism? and warns against leaning too much on ?indiscriminate faith?.

As he told an interviewer in 1989: ?We have enough religions. Enough religions, but not enough human beings? Don?t let us talk too much about religion. Let us talk of what is human.? Iyer tries to explain the conundrum that is the Dalai Lama ? this ?religious teacher who is telling people not to get entangled or distracted by religion; a Tibetan who is suggesting that Tibet doesn?t have all the answers; a Buddhist who, more and more, is urging foreigners not to take up Buddhism but to study within their own traditions.?

Iyer infuses the book with delightful detail. Like for instance, the fact that the Dalai Lama loved playing with Meccano sets as a boy in the Potala Palace or about his love for animals ? ?some people tell me that because I like animals I will come back in my next life as an animal?. Iyer talks to the Dalai Lama?s siblings, spends time with his younger brother Ngari Rinpoche who self-admittedly likes to rock the boat. ?Our people need to be challenged, to

think harder.?

Even as the Dalai Lama carries the burden of the millions of Tibetan refugees who long for their home, he holds fast to the view that ?some of our dreams we may not achieve in our lifetime?. But you must make the effort.? No one will forget what the Dalai Lama has done for the cause of Tibet. But is it enough? That?s the question that?s plaguing the ?simple monk? as well.

?I happened to travel down to see the Dalai Lama the very day after he had been awarded the Nobel Prize in 1989?. He asked me how he should use the money and looked at me piercingly, clearly waiting for an answer. He told me that sometimes he felt that he could never do enough, and that nothing he did could really affect things (a prescient and far-sighted concern, in some ways, as, after the excitement and sense of possibility the Nobel awakened had subsided, Tibet was only 10 years closer to destruction). He told me that was ?up to us poor humans to make the effort? one step at a time, and again, as if invoking the final words of the Buddha, he spoke of ?constant effort, tireless effort, pursuing clear goals with sincere effort.? Then, as we were walking out of the room, he went back and turned off the light. It?s such a small thing, he said, it hardly makes a difference at all. And yet nothing is lost in the doing of it, and maybe a little good can come of it, if more and more people remember this small gesture in more and more rooms.?