Ved mehta new yorker series#

More precisely, its ability to consistently describe what only an excellent pair of eyes could see and a sharp mind observe, preserve and process. In fact, the finest wonder of his writing is his descriptive acumen.

That is not to commit sacrilege by taking anything away from Mehta’s gamut of works about his country-or countries-and the world around him. And perhaps for that very reason, he remained his most important subject, no matter what and where he wrote. So what was Mehta in exile from? Perhaps the answer that comes nearest the mark is: himself.

Ved mehta new yorker series#

Although ‘exile’ comes straight off the title of his autobiography series published over three decades, one is uncomfortable using the word as label for a man who felt at home everywhere and nowhere. And become an expatriate at an early age and subsequently an exile. Born to a fairly affluent family in Lahore, he could travel continents. Why else would history abound with blind seers? Ved Mehta, who died in New York on January 9th at 86, had been blind almost his whole life, having lost his eyesight in early childhood. Yet, to be robbed of one of the senses is to experience all the others sharpened. That’s more of a truism than learning to hear after we lose our hearing. He could rework a single article more than a hundred times, he often said.WE BEGIN TO SEE when we can no longer see. His literary style derived partly from his singular way of working: Blind from the age of 3, 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. 'He writes about serious matters without solemnity, about scholarly matters without pedantry, about abstruse matters without obscurity.' 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. '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. Besides his multivolume memoir, published in book form between 19, his more than two dozen 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. Associated with the magazine for more than three decades - much of his magnum opus began as articles in its pages - Mehta was widely considered the 20th-century writer most responsible for introducing American readers to India. The cause was complications of Parkinson's disease, his wife, Linn Cary Mehta, said.

Ved Mehta, a longtime writer for The New Yorker whose best-known work, spanning a dozen volumes, explored the vast, turbulent history of modern India through the intimate lens of his own autobiography, died Saturday at his home in Manhattan.