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Autobiographical excerpt:
"Deprivation
often makes a writer. I was born, in 1934, into a Hindu family
in India. When I was a couple of months short of my fourth birthday,
I lost my sight as the result of an attack of cerebrospinal meningitis.
In India, one of the poorest countries the world has ever known,
the lot of the blind was to beg with a walking stick in one hand
and an alms bowl in the other. Hindus consider blindness a punishment
for sins committed in a previous incarnation. But my father, a
doctor, tried to fight the superstition and give me an education,
like his other children, so that I could become, as he used to
say, a self-supporting citizen of the world." Read
more from Ved Mehta's personal history...
From
"Sightless in a Sighted World," by Ved Mehta, Encyclopedia
Britannica, Medical 2nd Health Annual, 1985.
Read Ved Mehta's
entry in The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English
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