Ved Mehta
Ved Parkash Mehta (Born March 21, 1934) is a writer who was born in Lahore, British India (now a Pakistani city) to a Hindu family. He lost his sight at the age of four as the result of an attack of cerebrospinal meningitis.[1] Because of the limited prospects for blind people in general,[2] his father, a doctor, sent him over 1,300 miles away[2] to the Dadar School for the Blind in Bombay.[3]
Mehta has lived in the Western world since 1949; he became an American citizen in 1975. He was educated at Pomona College, at Balliol College, Oxford where he read Modern History, and at Harvard University, where he earned a double BA and MA.[4] His first book, an autobiography called Face to Face, which placed his early life in the context of Indian politics and history and Anglo-Indian relations, was published in 1957.[3] Since then he has written more than 24 books, including several that deal with the subject of blindness, as well as hundreds of articles and short stories, for British, Indian and American publications such as The New Yorker, where he was a staff writer from 1961 to 1994, during which time Spy magazine published a critical article about his misogynist attitude toward his assistants and writings that were frequently regarded as dull and self-indulgent.[5] He left the magazine after, as he has claimed, he was "terminated" by editor Tina Brown.[6]
He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2009.[7]
His wife, Linn Cary Mehta, is a descendant of James Fenimore Cooper and niece of Mehta's former New Yorker colleague Henry S. F. Cooper, Jr.; they married in 1983.[1]
[edit] Selected works
- Face to Face (autobiography, 1957)
- Walking the Indian Streets (travel journal, 1960)
- Fly and the Fly-Bottle: Encounters with British Intellectuals (contemporary philosophy and historiography; Boston: Little Brown, 1962)
- The New Theologian (Christian theology; New York, Harper and Row, 1966)
- Delinquent Chacha (novel; New York: Harper and Row, 1966)
- Portrait of India (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1970)
- John Is Easy to Please: Encounters with the Written and the Spoken Word (transformational grammar, 1971), ISBN 0-374-17986-7
- Daddyji (biography, 1972), ISBN 0-374-13438-3
- Mahatma Gandhi and His Apostles (portrait of Gandhi, 1977), ISBN 0-670-45087-1
- The New India (study of modernisation, 1978), ISBN 0-670-50735-0
- A Family Affair: India Under Three Prime Ministers (1982) ISBN 0-19-503118-0
- A Ved Mehta Reader: The Craft of the Essay (Yale, 1998) ISBN 978-0300075618
- All for Love (2002) ISBN 1-56025-321-5
[edit] References
- ^ a b Leland, John (May 22, 2003). "At Home With Ved Mehta: In a Dark Harbor, A Bright House". The New York Times. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F02E5DB1E3EF931A15756C0A9659C8B63. Retrieved 2009-02-15.
- ^ a b Booth, Tony; Swann, Will; Masterton, Mary (1992). Learning for All: Curricula for Diversity in Education. Routledge. p. 312. ISBN 0415071844. ISBN 9780415071840. http://books.google.com/books?id=aiYOAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA304&dq=Ved+Mehta+-inauthor:%22Ved+Mehta%22&lr=&ei=k1eaSf6MAYS6kQTjqv3lCQ&client=firefox-a#PPA312,M1.
- ^ a b Kendrick, Baynard (August 25, 1957). "Seeking the Light". The New York Times. http://www.vedmehta.com/reviews/face-nytimes.htm.
- ^ "When loss isn't' less". Financial Express. http://www.financialexpress.com/news/When-loss-isnt-less/538584/. Retrieved 2009-11-08.
- ^ Conant, Jannett (September 1989). "Slaves of The New Yorker". Spy Magazine: 112. http://books.google.com/books?id=MBsraeHJRB4C&pg=PA112&lpg=PA112&dq=spy+magazine+jonathan+schell&source=bl&ots=_kHAoWvQ3L&sig=OFcy9YiXflNQPQFpExZrHSNceSk&hl=en&ei=G-jATc7_Cer20gHn69W3Cg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=5&ved=0CDEQ6AEwBA#v=onepage&q=schell&f=false.
- ^ Kuczinski, Alex (January 11, 1999). "Writer Finds No Room at the Library". The New York Times (Proquest.com).
- ^ "Royal Society of Literature All Fellows". Royal Society of Literature. http://www.rslit.org/content/fellows. Retrieved 10 August 2010.
