Ved Mehta, a renowned Indian-born writer died in his home in New York on Saturday due to complications from Parkinson's disease, his wife Linn Cary Mehta said in a statement. He was 86.
Born in 1934 in Lahore, Mehta was afflicted with blindness at the age of three due to cerebrospinal meningitis. However, his father, Amolak Ram Mehta, was determined to give him a decent education and sent him off to study in a school for the blind in Bombay.
Mehta was then sent to Dehra Dun to learn Braille reading and touch typing, a skill that enabled him to apply to colleges for the blind in the US.
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Later, he got admission in one of the colleges, followed by stints at Oxford and Harvard. In 1961, at the age of 26, Mehta was hired as a staff for the New Yorker by William Shawn, one of the legendary editors of the magazine, who was impressed by Mehta's early autobiographical pieces.
His first book, Face to Face (1957), explored his struggles with blindness, which would become an abiding theme of his work. He drew luminous portraits of Indian life in books like Walking the Indian Streets (1959) and Portrait of India (1970). In his 12-volume memoir Continents of Exile, published between 1972 and 2004, he wrote about his early life in India, his parents, relatives and the political landscape of the country since independence and Partition.
