Ved Mehta
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Ved Parkash Mehta (Born March 21, 1934) is a writer who was born in Lahore, 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. His father, a doctor, tried to give him an education, like his other children, so that he could become a self-supporting citizen of the world.
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. His first book was published in 1957. Since then he has written 14 books, including three 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.
"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 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.
[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, 1962)
- The New Theologian (Christian theology, 1966)
- Delinquent Chacha (novel, 1966)
- Portrait of India (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
- All for Love (2002) ISBN 1-56025-321-5
