Renowned writer Ved Mehta dies at 86
Los Angeles, January 11, 2021
NRIpress.club/Ramesh/Agary Singh
Ved Mehta, a longtime writer for The New Yorker whose best-known work, spanning a dozen volumes, explored the vast, turbulent history of modern India through the intimate lens of his own autobiography, died Saturday at his home in Manhattan. He was 86. The cause was complications of Parkinson's disease, his wife, Linn Cary Mehta, said.
Associated with the magazine for more than three decades - much of his magnum opus began as articles in its pages - Mehta was widely considered the 20th-century writer most responsible for introducing American readers to India.
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VED MEHTA: Deprivation often makes a writer. I was born, in 1934,
into a Hindu family in India. When I was a couple of months
short of my fourth birthday, I lost my sight as the result
of an attack of cerebrospinal meningitis. In India, one of the
poorest countries the world has ever known, the lot of the blind
was to beg with a walking stick in one hand and an alms bowl in
the other. Hindus consider blindness a punishment for sins committed
in a previous incarnation. But my father, a doctor, tried to fight
the superstition and give me an education, like his other children,
so that I could become, as he used to say, a self-supporting citizen
of the world."
MORE-Sightless
in a Sighted World