How Delhi has been written over the years in novels and in stories (and essays)
The pandemic may have silenced the urban legends of the capital for a year, but there is enough and more in literature to look back on. Connaught Place, Delhi, before the pandemic. | PRAKASH SINGH / AFP
All great cities have great stories. New York, Cairo, Istanbul, Moscow, Shanghai among others, all have their grand, capacious histories, replete with triumphs, setbacks and even the odd comic interlude. Delhi has its glorious chronicles too, but they compete with those of New Delhi and more recently of all the Newer Delhis in the making.
Ved Mehta An illustrious writer of the sub-continent
By News Desk| Updated: 16th January 2021 12:23 pm IST
Fakir Syed Aijazuddin
To Lahoris, Sheranwala is one of the twelve gates that led into the ancient walled city. To New Yorkers, it was the portal through which they were admitted into the mind of the gifted writer Ved Mehta.
Ved was born in Lahore in March 1934. He died in New York on 9 January 2021. In his benighted youth, Ved attended the then Emerson School of the Blind located near Sheranwala Gate. The scars from the callousness of insensitive teachers had healed by the time he migrated to India in 1947. The lesions on his psyche remained.
The writer is an author.
TO Lahoris, Sheranwala is one of the 12 gates that led into the ancient walled city. To New Yorkers, it was the portal through which they were admitted into the mind of the gifted writer Ved Mehta.
Ved was born in Lahore in March 1934. He died in New York on Jan 9, 2021. In his benighted youth, Ved attended the then Emerson School of the Blind located near Sheranwala Gate. The scars from the callousness of insensitive teachers had healed by the time he migrated to India in 1947. The lesions on his psyche remained.
Determined to do more with his life than threading cane chairs or playing a musical instrument, he moved to the United States at the age of 15. There, at Arkansas School for the Blind, in Little Rock, he learned to compensate for the loss of one of his senses by refining the other four.