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.
Ved Mehta, celebrated staff writer at The New Yorker and acclaimed author, passes away aged 86 Mehta was long praised by critics for his forthright, luminous prose with its “informal elegance, diamond clarity and hypnotic power”. Ved Mehta. Photo courtesy
Penguin Random House India
Ved Mehta, a longtime writer for
The New Yorker whose best-known work, spanning a dozen volumes, explored the vast, turbulent history of modern India through the intimate lens of his own autobiography, died Saturday at his home in Manhattan. He was 86.
The cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease, his wife, Linn Cary Mehta, said.
Associated with the magazine for more than three decades much of his magnum opus began as articles in its pages Mehta was widely considered the 20th-century writer most responsible for introducing American readers to India.
NEW YORK – Ved Mehta, an Indian American novelist who shone a bright literary light of evocativeness and imagery overcoming his blindness, has died here at the age of 86.