Inder has also worked as a writer and editor for news and literary publications in Canada, the United Kingdom and India.

From the archives

“Meet the New Booker, Same as the Old Booker”,
Litro

…The award’s significance to the reading public, however, lies in the popularity of its brand. Even those authors omitted from the shortlist will surely highlight their longlist nods on blurbs and press kits. A Booker nomination is an important statement on a writer’s critical and popular appeal — alarmingly, most of the English-speaking world has appears to have been found lacking. Though the chosen novelists are deserving, the 2014 cohort represents an utter failure of imagination and mission on behalf of the judging committee. Offered an opportunity to make a decisive mark on the selection process following their organization’s noisy proclamation on its global outlook, the judges instead opted to punt.

“BOOK REVIEW: KING OF THE JUNGLE BY KS SILKWOOD”,
Litro

…So engaging is the prose that you’ll forgive the pacing of the novel, where the material plot appears in fragments over the first half and is only really explored in earnest towards the very end. King of the Jungle is far more successful when playing to its strengths — vignettes and character study — than when it half-heartedly connects these back to romantic entanglements. Happily, this does not detract from the overall effect of Silkwood’s sort-of polemic, wherein he lays into the London arts scene with the kind of vicious contempt usually reserved for investment bankers. An ideal Father’s Day gift if you’re on difficult terms with your father.

“Lead, Kindly Light!”
Tehelka

…The Barefoot College workshop is one long room, housed in a colonial-era building on the college’s old 1972 campus (a newer campus was set up about a kilometre away in 1987). Though free to sit wherever they please along the work table, the women typically cluster together along linguistic lines. A woman beside Christa and Susanna from northern Namibia doesn’t speak Khoekhoe, but communicates through gestures. Across from the Namibians, Monica Milega from north Tanzania’s Meatu district works determinedly on her lamp. “Things are very good”, says the 42-year-old farmer and mother of eight. Monica says she hasn’t had much difficulty adjusting to life in India, although communication may sometimes pose a problem. She receives weekly assurances from her family back home that her cows, goats and donkeys are being taken care of while she’s away. She smiles and says that her main goal is to ensure she is able to teach other villagers what she has learned here.

At the other end of the table, 35-year-old Yatsa Gambai of Sierra Leone nods in agreement: the important thing, she says, is that they teach other people when they go back home in September. Susanna says the first thing she plans to do on returning to Serabu is put up lights in her house: “We’ll light our house first so people can see what we have brought back with us.”