Well – i don’t know how i wandered on to this site (4.17am, random googling in need of going on holiday again as 2 weeks in Scotland is more than enough..) so anyways, u were all talking about Spain! I wana go in Easter time – is there a lot of desi’s there? and is food really a problem (saying i’m muslim)?

Anyways – would like a reply… your lil diary thing at the top was endearing, bless yer cotton sox! x

Listen to them: the children of the night. What sweet music they make.

Jai, you’re a Londoner. Do you feel as though a magical presence has just drifted through your life? At the time Manish arrived in London, didn’t you feel as though life was better? That things weren’t so bad? An inexplicable sense of well-being, like the aura of a greater being was among us?

No, but I did notice strange things like the weather suddenly becoming icy cold, wolves howling at night, weird shadows on broomsticks flitting across the moon, feeling that “something” was watching me when I was asleep, and so on. It seemed to go back to normal after Manish left the country.

{Just joking, Manish }

Jai, you’re a Londoner. Do you feel as though a magical presence has just drifted through your life? At the time Manish arrived in London, didn’t you feel as though life was better? That things weren’t so bad? An inexplicable sense of well-being, like the aura of a greater being was among us?

Nah me neither.

Neel, a lot of those tapas places on Las Ramblas employ Punjabis with acute deshdar (like gaydar, but less useful for those who possess it ) I still object to the blandness of the papas allioli and champiñones. The colonists could learn something from Mexico

to be a happy vegetarian traveller, stick to the tourist areas. most tourist areas have some vegetarian options. I was in Barcelona in 2001 and had some of the best food in my life. Whenever I was hungry, I’d hop onto a train and head for Rambla.

“Londonstani”, Gautam Malkani’s electrifying debut, reveals a Britain that has never before been explored in the novel: a country of young Asians and white boys (desis and goras) trying to work out a place for themselves in the shadow of the divergent cultures of their parents’ generation

Set close to the Heathrow feed roads of Hounslow, Malkani shows us the lives of a gang of four young men: Hardjit the ring leader, a Sikh, violent, determined his caste stay pure; Ravi, determinedly tactless, a sheep following the herd; Amit, whose brother Arun is struggling to win the approval of his mother for the Hindu girl he has chosen to marry; and Jas who tells us of his journey with these three, desperate to win their approval, desperate too for Samira, a Muslim girl, which in this story can only have bad consequences.

Together they cruise the streets in Amit’s enhanced Beemer, making a little money changing the electronic fingerprints on stolen mobile phones, a scam that leads them into more dangerous waters. Funny, crude, disturbing, written in the vibrant language of its protagonists – a mix of slang, Bollywood, texting, Hindu and bastardised gangsta rap – “Londonstani” is about many things: tribalism, aggressive masculinity, integration, cross-cultural chirpsing techniques, the urban scene seeping into the mainstream, bling bling economics, ‘complicated family-related shit’. It is one of the most surprising British novels of recent years.

Also being published this year is novel Tourism by a new writer called Nirpal Singh Dhaliwal.

Bhupinder ‘Puppy’ Singh Johal – handsome, rakish and spiritually disenfranchised – has left behind the immigrant neighbourhood of Southall to mix with the elite of metropolitan London society. When sloaney rich-girl Sophie, falls for him, he grabs the chance to escape his past and pursue the woman of his dreams, the voluptuous sophisticate Sarupa, who happens to be engaged to Sophie’s cousin. Using whatever and whoever he can, Puppy explores the grit and glamour of a city seething with the possibilities and politics of money, race and sex: an incendiary cocktail that explodes, changing him and those closest to him forever…Set in the long hot summer of 2002, “Tourism” is a filthy, unflinching and politically incorrect take on modern Britain.

So it looks like being the year that Southall and West London Punjabi life gets represented fully on the London literary scene.