![]() ![]() ‘ was so adept at using small stories to cast light on a big picture,’ writes critic Jai Arjun Singh on his blog, ‘that his mentor, the legendary New Yorker editor William Shawn, developed a new rubric-“Personal History”-especially for his profiles.’ In a 2009 article for Business Standard, writer and critic Nilanjana S Roy notes that ‘Nothing is exempt from Mehta’s need to set it all down, not the years of apprenticeship with Mr Shawn, the legendary New Yorker editor, not his blindness, not his sessions on the psychiatrist’s couch.’ This is borne out in his ‘million-word plus’ 11-volume autobiography Continents of Exile-comprising well-known accounts of his father, Daddyji, his mother, Mummyji, and his uncle, Mamaji, and ending with Red Letters-which he began in 1972 and completed in 2003. This offers testimony to the considerable regard Mehta holds for episodes of his personal life, and indeed what a careful chronicler he is of the everyday, of what is often dismissed as the commonplace. The reader came away convinced of ‘Mehta’s’ blindness. There are also some marvellous, fantastical anecdotes that make an appearance in various interviews, such as that splendid one about a reader not believing Mehta was blind because of his famously detailed descriptions, and making faces before an impassive VS Naipaul, whom he mistook for Mehta. Or observations he has made in other interviews, which can be found handily collated on his website. (Bowker Author Biography) - biography from Remembering Mr.The stories writer Ved Mehta-polite even when he edits your English, soft-spoken, precise in speech-tells you in person are very often anecdotes you would find recounted in his enviably large body of work. Ved Mehta died at his home in Manhattan on Januat the age of 86. ![]() He was given an honorary degree from Pomona College, Bard College, Williams College, The University of Stirling, and Bowdoin College. In 1982, he received the MacArthur Foundation "genius grant." In 2009, he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 19. After leaving The New Yorker, he taught at Yale, Vassar, New York University, and elsewhere. He was hired as a staff writer in 1961 and remained there until 1994. He worked for more than thirty years at The New Yorker magazine. Shawn's New York: The Invisible Art of Editing (1998). His other books included Walking the Indian Streets The Fly and the Fly-Bottle: Encounters with British Intellectuals (1963) The New Theologian (1966) John is Easy to Please (1971) Delinquent Chacha (1967) and Remembering Mr. The last book in the series, The Red Letters, was published in 2004. They were collectively known as, Continents of Exile. But he was best-known work was a 12-volume memoir that also illuminated the history of India. He wrote numerous articles on life in 20th-century India. He received his master's degree from Harvard in 1961. He earned a second bachelor's degree in modern history from Balliol College, Oxford. ![]() He later attended Pomona College in Southern California, graduating in 1956. At 15, he came to the United States to attend a school for the blind in Arkansas. He was born in Lahore, India on March 21, 1934. ![]() Ved Parkash Mehta was an America writer and journalist. ![]()
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