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Ved Parkash Mehta (21 March 19349 January 2021) was an Indian-born writer who lived and worked mainly in the United States. Blind from an early age, Mehta is best known for an autobiography published in installments from 1972 to 2004. He wrote for The New Yorker for many years.
Ved lost his sight at the age of three due to cerebrospinal meningitis. Due to the limited prospects for blind people at that time, his parents sent him over away to the Dadar School for the Blind in Bombay (present-day Mumbai). Beginning around 1949, he attended the Arkansas School for the Blind.
Mehta received a BA from Pomona College in 1956; a BA from Balliol College, Oxford, in 1959, where he read modern history; and an MA from Harvard University in 1961. While at Pomona, as very few books were available in Braille, Mehta used student readers, one of whom was Eugene Rose, who went on to become the Russian Orthodox hieromonk 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."
A 1982 profile, published after Mehta was announced as a MacArthur Fellow, stated that he had "gained critical note as a weaver of profiles, as an interviewer who can interpret character and context in the exchange of words with a subject. He is scholarly and journalistic and, above all, a man who thinks things out." In 1989, Jennet Conant produced an article for Spy reflecting on the alleged decline in quality of the New Yorker after the departure of editor William Shawn; recounting criticism of the new editor's "peculiar hobbies" including collecting "aluminium tumblers and plastic handbags", mockery and attacking of "previously untouchable" journalists including Renata Adler and Janet Malcolm, and the fact that "the legions of loyal, tight-lipped young women- the secretaries, typists, fact-checkers and editorial assistants" had begun to "talk. Well, moan, really. Sob. Whine. Wail and complain" about "old wounds and ... past injustices", particularly those who were employed to "painstakingly transcribe" what Conant considered the "long-winded, self-obsessed, Oxford-educated English prose" of Mehta, who the article also accused of being unduly demanding and critical of the young women thus employed, asking them personal questions about their habits and lives. He left the magazine after, as he claimed, he was "terminated" by editor Tina Brown.
One of the articles he wrote for The New Yorker in 1961 consisted of interviews with Oxford philosophers. A volume of the letters of one of those philosophers, Isaiah Berlin, contains an honest response to Mehta's inquiry about the reactions of his subjects: "You ask me what the reactions of my colleagues are to your piece on Oxford Philosophy... Those to whom I have spoken are in various degrees outraged or indignant ... 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." (2013). 9781448191345, Random House. ISBN 9781448191345 The article was published as a book, now including other public intellectuals, as Fly and the Fly-Bottle: Encounters with British Intellectuals (1962). (2025). 9780192806871, Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780192806871
Mehta's autobiography, titled Continents of Exile, was published in 12 instalments between 1972 and 2004. Its first volume, Daddyji (1972), is part autobiography and part biography of Mehta's father. Mehta became an American citizen in 1975.
A 1978 profile by Madhur Jaffrey wrote that Mehta regarded himself as "part Indian", "part English", "part American", and as an "expatriate".
Mehta died on 9 January 2021, with complications from Parkinson's disease.
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