Siddharth Pico Raghavan Iyer, popularly known as Pico Iyer, is a British-born, Oxford-educated essayist and novelist. He has traveled widely and writes continuously about his traveling experiences, adding new dimensions to the scope of the Indian diaspora in the context of his idea of the “Global Soul.” Son of Raghavan N. Iyer and Nandini Nanak Mehta, Pico Iyer spent his childhood between California and England. He was a King’s scholar at Eton College and studied at Magdalen College, Oxford, and Harvard University. He is a teacher, writer, speaker, thinker, and visionary who probes such topics as traveling, cultural mixing of diaspora, displacement, and spirituality. He is married to Hiroko Takeuchi and has lived in Nara, Japan, since 1992.