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
