Ved Mehta
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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. His father, a doctor, tried to give him an education, like his other children, so that the boy 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 24 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, including the The New Yorker, where Mehta worked as a staff writer for 33 years.
"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 stick in one hand and an alms bowl in the other."
