Pico Iyer has been engaged in conversation with the Dalai Lama for the last three decades. Now, in this insightful, impassioned book, Iyer captures the paradoxes of the Dalai Lama's position. Though he has brought the idea 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 of ideas and the daily challenges of a global icon.