GANESH SAILI’S book Gupp & Gossip from the hills, ‘is a wacky take-off about everyday things,’ says Saili, adding: ‘I am aware that humour isn’t the easiest thing to write. But living in a small town is like life lived in a fishbowl. Almost anyone knows your business or at least claims to know. Even things about you, you yourself don’t know.’

The book is both informative and entertaining with never a dull moment, never a dull page, it talks about everyone and everything that makes the Queen of Hills Mussoorie, unique.

‘Many people who went to school here return to the scene of the crime,as it were to discover that things have changed.’ He writes.‘For instance, an old friendof mine, Angela Middleton, who was a student at the austere, vegetarian Seventh Day Adventist School in the 1930s, tells me: ‘They relied as little as possible on hired labour with the students doing all the manual work.’

‘Now don’t you go eating chilly pickle!’ the grumpy matron used towarn the girls as they went out to town: ‘It heats the blood!’

‘The moment we hit town, we gobbled up as much of it as we could. Alas! No miracles happened,’ Angela chuckles almost sixty years later.

‘Still waiting for it to heat the blood!’ she jokes.

Anecdotal in style, the book is a personal collection of hilarious and sometimes scandalous gupp and gossip from the foothills of Himalayas. Its multitudecharacters amuse you with their tales as they send chinese whispers down the neighbourhood keeping the rumour-mill churning, making it close to impossible to put down the book before reaching the end.

Published by Niyogi Books, the 42 black and white sketches by gifted artist T.K. Manoj Kumar who spent four years of his bureaucratic career in the foothills of the Himalaya add value to the written word.

If you think you know-it-all about what makes the hills a special place, it’s the localsalong with the beautiful landscape that adds beauty and spice to the environ. Gupp and Gossip from the hills, is abook you keep close to yourself as it promises to amuse and entertain the reader at all times.