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.
Ved Mehta, an Eclectic Writer of Prose Whose Disability Didn t Prevent Him from Seeing the World
A tribute by a younger writer and longstanding admirer who was greatly inspired by Mehta.
Ved Mehta. Photo: YouTube screengrab
Culture11/Jan/2021
The writer Ved Mehta has died. He was 86. He will be remembered in India for his moving account of his childhood â at the age of three, he became blind after suffering from an attack of meningitis. He was admitted by his affluent doctor father at the Dadar School for the Blind. After a distinguished scholarly career that took him from Pomona College in California to Oxford University and then to Harvard, he joined