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In this volume of a remarkable life story, Ved Mehta takes us through his college years—an adventurous young adulthood in California. After his father—a retired Indian-government health official—managed to secure the means to enter him in Pomona College, Ved set out to prove himself as a blind student among the sighted. For the first time, he was able to give his intellectual curiosity full play and pursue academic distinction—flexing and stretching and moving with newfound independence. Longing for all the normal experiences of the average American student, he joined a fraternity, revived the school’s International Relations Club, wrote for the school newspaper, and even bought a ...
Unsurpassed as a prose stylist, Ved Mehta is an acknowledged master of the essay form. In this book—the first special collection of Mehta’s outstanding writing—the distinguished author demonstrates a wide range of possibilities available to the narrative and descriptive writer today. Addressing subjects that range from religion to politics and on to education, and writing with eloquence and high style, Mehta here offers a sampling of his works. Mehta provides a splendid, insightful introduction on the craft of the essay, meditating on the long history and diverse purposes of the form and on the struggle of learning to write in it himself. In the eight reportorial, autobiographical, and reflective essays that follow—each a self-contained examination of cultural, intellectual, or personal themes—he writes on his experience of becoming an American citizen; on Christian theology, with a focus on Dietrich Bonhoeffer; on Calcutta and the poorest of the Indian poor; on the disastrous fates of three of Mehta’s brilliant Oxford contemporaries; and on a variety of other subjects.
There can seldom have been a more unpromising subject for a film or a book than Chachaji, and yet he became the hero of a celebrated documentary film, CHACHAJI, MY POOR RELATION: A MEMOIR BY VED MEHTA. He also became the hero of this book, which is, among other things, an account of the making of that film. Indeed, he has become, in a sense, a metaphor for the whole of India in all its splendid contradictions. Mr. Mehta and an Anglo-American filming team—led by a Tasmanian-born Canadian producer—travelled to India, where they were soon joined by the producer’s wife, a great-great-grandniece of William Wordsworth. The team spent a month filming Chachaji, an eighty-three-year-old man who...
Book 2 in Ved Mehta's Continents of Exile series. Nearly 50 years in the making, Continents of Exile is one of the great works of twentieth-century autobiography: the epic chronicle of an Indian family in the twentieth century. From 1930s India to 1950s Oxford and literary New York in the 1960s-80s, this is the story of the post-colonial twentieth century, as uniquely experienced and vividly recounted by Ved Mehta. After studying in the United States, Mehta - blind since childhood - achieves his dream of enrolling at the University of Oxford: a place that has consumed his imagination ever since he was a small boy growing up under the British Raj. In Up at Oxford, Mehta recalls the nuances of his conversations, the range of his youthful emotions, and the sounds, smells, and tastes of university life. Along the way he draws memorable portraits of, among others, novelists, poets, scholars, and peers.
This is the true and intimate story of one man and his love of four women, each of them very different, but each in her turn the object of his hopes and desires. What does Ved Mehta want of these women? To be loved by them, to marry them, to have children with them. He has been blind since childhood. Love, marriage, children—all these, he imagines, would make him whole. And the women, Gigi, Vanessa, Lola and Kilty? What do they want? It seems for a time that they too want to love him, marry him, have his children. But desire is a dangerous emotion and the state of being in love both illusory and mysterious. In spare and elegant prose, Ved Mehta transforms that most subjective of all human ...
Ved Mehta's brilliant Mahatma Gandhi and his Apostles provides an unparalleled portrait of the man who lead India out of its colonial past and into its modern form. Travelling all over India and the rest of the world, Mehta gives a nuanced and complex, yet vividly alive, portrait of Gandhi and of those men and women who were inspired by his actions.
Blind since the age of four, Ved Mehta led a lonely and turbulent childhood in India until he was accepted to the Arkansas School for the Blind, to which he flew alone at fifteen. America and the school changed his life, leading to degrees at Oxford and Harvard Universities and a fruitful writing career. Face to Face (1957), Mehta’s first book, is the author’s autobiography touching upon childhood, blindness and remaking himself. It remains one of his most beloved works.
“Namaste.” Vedi’s father bade him the Hindu farewell. “You are a man now.” It was the first step in Ved Mehta’s long journey toward independence. He was a month shy of five years old, and he was to spend much of the next four years thirteen hundred miles away from home and family, at Dadar School for the Blind—really a mission orphanage, in a sooty section of Bombay, that had only the barest facilities but was run by an American-trained Indian Christian principal with Western ideas about education. Before Vedi was four, he had been left blind by meningitis. His father, a well-to-do, England-trained Hindu doctor, was determined that his son not experience the usual lot of the bl...
This definitive collection of Ved Mehta’s work contains excerpts from nearly all his writings, many of which first appeared in the New Yorker. It begins with his first book, the classic autobiography highlighting his blindness, Face to Face, and features his iconic books about India and his family saga, Continents of Exile. Each entry comes with a reflection by Mehta. Authoritative and illuminating, the book is not just an introduction to this seminal author but also a passionate record of a writer looking back upon his own work.