VED MEHTA CELEBRATED WRITER THE NEW SERIES

Saintliness was only one aspect of the man. Mehta’s colleague Janet Flanner declared, “It’s as if, Mehta, he were beyond our human conception.”īut the reader has long since grown weary of that Mr. Even in death, Shawn remains in service to the needs of his writers.

Mehta’s memoir will claim fresh space beside James Thurber’s and Brendan Gill’s yellowing best sellers, The Years with Ross and Here at “The New Yorker.” However, it ultimately fails to go beyond its own boyish hero-worship. He gave me a shove, and we've been friends ever since’, the New Yorker reported.Mr. Madhur Jaffrey, the Indian-born actress and cookbook author, once told Maureen Dowd, of the New York Times, that when she first met Mehta, ‘I tried to take his arm to help. He wrote about Oxford dons, theology, Indian politics, and many other subjects. He joined the magazine when he was 26 and, for more than three decades, wrote a stream of pieces, many of them appearing in multipart series. After studying at Pomona College and Oxford University, he began to flourish in his working life as a writer. Mehta came to the United States when he was 15 years old, and attended the Arkansas School for the Blind, in Little Rock. Mehta walked the streets of the city without a cane or a seeing-eye dog, and he bristled when someone dared try to assist him. One of the most striking hallmarks of Mehta's prose was its profusion of visual description: of the rich and varied landscapes he encountered, of the people he interviewed, of the cities he visited, the NYT report said.

He could rework a single article more than a hundred times, he often said, the report said. Mehta composed all of his work orally, dictating long swaths to an assistant, who read them back again and again for him to polish until the work shone like a mirror. The recipient of a MacArthur Foundation genius grant in 1982, Mehta was long praised by critics for his forthright, luminous prose with its informal elegance, diamond clarity and hypnotic power, as The Sunday Herald of Glasgow put it in a 2005 profile, the New York Times reported on Sunday. 'He writes about serious matters without solemnity, about scholarly matters without pedantry, about abstruse matters without obscurity,” Shawn had said. 'Ved Mehta has established himself as one of the magazine's most imposing figures, The New Yorker's storied editor William Shawn, who hired him as a staff writer in 1961, told The New York Times in 1982.

VED MEHTA CELEBRATED WRITER THE NEW SERIES

'Daddyji' was the first installment in what was to become a 12-volume series of autobiographical works, known collectively as Continents of Exile. 'I felt that blindness was a terrible impediment, and that if only I exerted myself, and did everything my big sisters and big brother did, I could somehow become exactly like them,' he wrote.īest known for his 12-volume memoir, which focused on the troubled modern history of India and his early struggles with blindness, Mehta's 24 books included volumes of reportage on India, among them 'Walking the Indian Streets' (1960), 'Portrait of India' (1970) and 'Mahatma Gandhi and His Apostles' (1977), as well as explorations of philosophy, theology and linguistics. He was determined to apprehend the world around him with maximal accuracy and to describe it as best he could.

Ved mehta celebrated writer the new