Ved Mehta

Ved Parkash Mehta (born 21 March 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 to cerebrospinal meningitis. Because of the limited prospects for blind people in general, his father, Amolak Ram Mehta, a doctor, sent him over 1,300 miles away to the Dadar School for the Blind in Bombay.

He was educated at Pomona College, at Balliol College, Oxford where he read Modern History, and at Harvard University, where he earned a double BA and MA. While at Pomona, one of Mehta's student readers, because very few books were available in Braille at that time, was Eugene Rose, who went on to become the Russian Orthodox hieromonk Father Seraphim Rose. Mehta referred to him in two books, one of which was Stolen Light, his second book of memoirs: “I felt very lucky to have found Gene as a reader. ... He read with such clarity that I almost had the illusion that he was explaining things.”

Mehta has lived in the Western world since 1949; he became an American citizen in 1975. His first book, an autobiography called Face to Face, which placed his early life in the context of Indian politics and history and Anglo-Indian relations, was published in 1957. Since then he has written more than 24 books, including several that deal with the subject of blindness, as well as hundreds of articles and short stories, for British, Indian and American publications. He was a staff writer at The New Yorker from 1961 to 1994, during which time Spy magazine published a critical article about his misogynist attitude toward his assistants and writings that were frequently regarded as dull and self-indulgent. He left the magazine after, as he has claimed, he was "terminated" by editor Tina Brown.

One of the articles he wrote for The New Yorker in 1961 consisted of interviews with famous Oxford philosophers. A volume of the letters of one of those philosophers, Isaiah Berlin, published in 2013 contains an angry letter in response to the article: “The New Yorker is a satirical magazine, and I assume from the start that a satire was intended and not an accurate representation of the truth. In any case, only a serious student of philosophy could attempt to do that.” The article was published as a book, now including Oxford historians as well, Fly and the Fly-Bottle: Encounters with British Intellectuals (1962).

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