“The book narrates the landmark events in my early life, from my losing my sight to cerebrospinal meningitis, two months short of my fourth birthday, through my father’s sending me some 1,300 miles away from our home, in the Punjab, to a boarding school in Bombay, when I wasn’t even five. The first part of the book begins with the section Distant India and it has excerpts from Mehta’s Face to Face. Read together, they will, I hope, give a sense of my writing life.” I have written an introduction for each selection and ordered them in such a way that each piece speaks to the next one. Writings that are close to my heart are anyway so close that I can almost recite them as I read and reread my pieces over and over again before they are published.” About The Essential Ved Mehta, the author adds, “The pieces in this collection are taken from all of my non fiction books except Fly and the Fly-Bottle and The New Theologian. I didn’t read most of the pieces reissued, in fact, I never read my pieces after they are published as there is no way I can make any changes to them. So it is like presenting the writing all over again, writing never gets stale and if it is good it will get picked up. Also even after the work is published, there is no way to believe that all the people must have read it. However, I believe that a piece of writing is immortal and you can never say that a piece of writing is dead after being published once, that’s my conviction about my writings. So one idea was to bring these pieces back to people’s attention and the other reason can be that there was no other way to sell them. I am one of those writers whose books have never been sold. On coming up with excerpts of his already published works, Mehta says, “I have written for over 60 years now and none of the books that I wrote sold very well. Authoritative and illuminating, The Essential Ved Mehta is not just an introduction to this seminal writer but also a passionate record of a writer looking back upon his own work. Each entry comes with a reflection by Mehta. It begins with his first book, the classic autobiography highlighting his blindness, Face to Face, and goes on to feature, among others, his iconic books about India and his great family saga Continents of Exile. It is a definitive collection of the author’s work, containing excerpts from nearly all his writings. Mehta lives in New York and the last time he visited India was four years ago, for he says “I need a good reason to come to India.” This time the good reason that brings him to India is his latest book, The Essential Ved Mehta, published by Penguin. A staff writer on the New Yorker from 1960 to 1993, he has won many awards and is a fellow of Balliol College, Oxford, and the Royal Society of literature. He was born in 1934 in lahore and educated largely in the USA. “The autobiography was written out of a feeling that I could partly alleviate a life of deprivation by writing about it,” says the author of 27 acclaimed books of fiction and non-fiction. But Ved Mehta not only wrote it but also became famous for it and by the time he was 26, he was writing for his livelihood. Author Ved Mehta spoke to Divya Kaushik about how he didn’t want to be known as a travel, Indian or blind writer but just a narrator of storiesĪn autobiography is not expected by someone who is just 23.
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