Hello! I am Anoop. Born and raised in New Delhi, I now reside in California. I hold an MFA in Creative Writing from Saint Mary’s College of California and am the recipient of the 2021 Advisory Board Award, and the 2023 Alumni Scholarship. I am the author of four novels: “The Rummy Club”, which won the 2015 Beverly Hills Book Award, “The Awakening of Meena Rawat” an excerpt of which was nominated for the 2019 Pushcart Prize, “No Ordinary Thursday,” and “Mercy and Grace”. You may also recognize me from the show Gems of Ruby Hill, a reality-TV series streaming on @watchcpics showcasing my life as an author and writer. I call myself a recovering litigator: I practiced in state and federal courts for many years before I  replaced legal briefs with fictional tales. I am an Instructor at Stanford University’s Stanford Continuing Studies.

I was inspired to write “Mercy and Grace”, because the India that exists now is very different from the one I grew up in. Over the years, the religious right in India has used hate propaganda to push the country away from its inclusive, secular founding vision as envisaged by Mahatma Gandhi.  Hinduism used to be a very liberal and tolerant religion, but India’s current prime minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has created a distinct fascist ideology dubbed “Hinduvata” to distinguish it from Hinduism. “The movement does not demand a theocratic state or any explicit embrace of Hinduism as the state religion. Hindutva is a national-cultural rather than a religious category, seen as synonymous with the idea of India. Indians of other faiths, including Muslims, should therefore have no trouble accepting Hindutva, according to the Sangh Parivar. If they choose not to, they must be traitors to the nation.” (Ref: https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-rise-of-hindu-nationalism/) I have watched the growing trend of extreme loathing backed by physical violence against Muslims and Christians with fear in my heart. I am not a Muslim myself, but I am a Sikh, a minority religion derivative of Hinduism. I witnessed firsthand how fundamentalist group leaders coordinated and led frenzied mob attacks against innocent Sikh citizens when Prime Minister Indra Gandhi was assassinated by her own Sikh security guard who acted solely of his own volition. In spite of the divisive political administration in the last White House election, I do not exaggerate when I say that I feel safer in the United States than I do in India. So, I wanted to write a novel about how the giving and taking of religious offense against minorities affects innocent people, ordinary people who have no stake in politics but are only trying to live their small lives.

That would probably be Sonia Shah, because of how the religious upheaval in her life and her past, causes her to become a very different woman from the one she initially was.

What a good question! My sister-in-law is a wedding coordinator of some note in the Los Angeles Indian community, so I do have quite a bit of insight into that business. I was legal counsel and president for 13 years of a 501 C(3) organization that provides financial support to more than 4000 orphan, destitute, or otherwise disadvantaged children via partner organizations in India. Therefore, I had firsthand knowledge of how orphanages in India operate.In writing this book what did surprise me was how frenzied mobs of Hindu fundamentalists hell-bent on Muslim blood resort to pulling down the underwear of Muslim men to see if they are circumcised or not as a way of determining if they are of Muslim faith or not.

I was raised in a middle-class family in New Delhi, India, where education was key, fresh pomfret fish for dinner was a treat, and budget-conscious holidays in hill stations defined our summers. As a young girl, I was expected to apply myself at college, get a job that would allow me to be financially self-reliant, get married, and have kids—in that order. Given this worldview, “writing” was a bourgeois activity, encouraged by my mom, an avid fan of Reader’s Digest and Harlequin romances. My mom loved stories, and she made up endless tales on the fly—Ravan, the demon who was afraid of cake, the fairy who couldn’t find her magic, the princess who was forced to marry the tyrannical prince and was rescued just in time by the pauper she loved. She gave me those things, and that’s how I survived adolescence. My command over the English language made me appear smarter than I was—growing up in post-colonial Delhi, where your zip code and what your Dad did for a living was all that mattered, the only way for a young woman to stand out was her chutzpah and her ability to flaunt her knowledge of big, blocky English words.  Soon, I had a prolific output. At age eleven, my mother made my brother, and I compete in a war of words—we had to write an essay about an out-of-town family wedding we’d attended—and, from the way my mom’s dark eyes shone as she read my offering, I knew I’d scored. In my teens, I spilled my hormonal angst over pages and pages of a daily journal that began with the salutation, “Dear, Diary.” One summer, I did an internship at a leading advertising agency as a copywriter, coming up with pithy slogans and jingles. After high school, when I enrolled in Hindu College at Delhi University to pursue a bachelor’s degree in English Literature, no one in my family was surprised. But, convention dictated that I procure a practical degree that would result in a paying job. This catapulted me into law school after graduation. Writing remained my first love, though—while pursuing my legal studies, I wrote a column for ‘Mid-day,’ a weekly newspaper, titled ‘University Beat’, and I was a correspondent for All India Radio, submitting weekly news stories that were read aloud on air. While in my second year at law school, I was approached by a publishing house (Twenty-Twenty Media) to write a Dummies—style book for recent college graduates on the legal profession titled “Law: What’s It All About and How to Get in.”  When a mess of typewritten pages—loosely bound by a haldi-stained pink ribbon—of dozens of interviews with notable legal experts in New Delhi became a published book of 92 pages, I couldn’t get over the shock of it. It was an eye-opening experience to see how good editing and an attractive book cover could transform my word vomit into a brilliantly-structured, polished work. I knew then that when I had the time, I would write books that appealed me to as a reader—fiction that wove imaginary worlds and left me spellbound with the magic of it. When I met and married my husband and immigrated to the United States, I continued to pursue my legal studies, acquiring both a JD and an Esq. at the end of my name. Writing legal briefs that would persuade judges opened my critical eye and taught me how to turn a good phrase. When I left law practice and stayed home to raise my kids, I began writing in earnest. Ten years ago, my dream came true with the launch of my first novel ‘The Rummy Club’ (Daggerhorn Publishing; 2014) that gave voice through my story to the East-Indian diaspora in the context of 21st century America. In the last ten years, I’ve continued to learn the craft of fiction and write stories that have been published in many literary journals  The themes of recreating identity, immigration, changing roles of women, and racial conflict deeply resonate with me and inspire me to write. I am passionate about applying these themes to my background and the traditions I grew up with, as well as the new traditions I have co-created with my first-generation children while living in America. I’m fortunate that I have a literary agent who believes in my stories, and although the publishing industry is fickle—my fifth novel narrating the story of two estranged sisters based on colorism—-didn’t receive much traction from acquiring editors forcing me to shelve it, I continue to write. As Anne Frank said, “I can shake off everything as I write; my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn.” (Excerpted from Anoop Judge’s Nov 1, 2020 blog post.) 

If I could visit any place in the world to be inspired to write my next novel, it would be South Africa. I found South Africa so different from every other place I have visited, with its safaris where you can watch the Big Five predators in their natural environment, and the country’s rich culture as manifested in its food and traditions.