One enters the Tibetan refugee neighborhood from gates along a busy thoroughfare. on the side of this road, where there aren't gates, there are squatters, some with cheap goods on display, some with thin unhappy dogs. The neighborhood is a grid of narrow laneways lined with stalls carrying fabrics, trinkets, phone services and internet, fruits. One moves further into the neighborhood from the min street and comes to the river. The shore is planted up, there are colourfully garbed women on their haunches tending to these fields. Back here some kids ran after me reaching for my pockets, the best I could do was play some impromptu reverse tag. I am * it *, which is all the things we all know it is - whitey mcpinkskin, carrying hordes of virtual wealth in my concealed moneybelt. Back here, a long uninterrupted view of a river, fields, one pedestrian bridge and one vehicle bridge, men pissing and one shitting, squatting on his haunches, enough other turds to make this commonplace, cows, more mangy dogs (sorry, I don't know whether they have mange, but we are so used to using these stock words - more on this soon). Next to the Tibetan neighborhood is a Buddhist temple, which this morning broadcast chanting which was playing in all the loudspeakers.

Now for more impressions from a long walk that spanned about a 4km diameter circle in northern Delhi.

Piles of bricks everywhere. Cows everywhere. On major streets. At least one of the white and black mottled variety. Traffic is dominated by bicycles, cycle-rickshaws usually carrying women, auto-rickshaws, buses, and down the list comes passenger cars.

No grid pattern in the streets whatsoever. Many intersections are shaped like a wishbone.
Back from the street, high walls often strung with barbed wire. Behind these walls? Sometimes run-down temples, full of squatters. Sometimes de-luxe apartments, or medical clinics or law offices. Greenspace everywhere, actually. I walked through large sections of park. There were monkeys, sometimes a dozen at once.

Saw some Delhi university campus buildings, actually some guys shooed me away from these, saw some schools and children's homes. Again, you've got a busy road, traffic moving on the left a la Britain, not-quite-sidewalks, walls with barbed wire, then a toss-up of run-down old building, under-construction new building, or complete building, at least one looking very modern.

Getting back to stock words, my brain keeps flashing * dilapidated * and * poverty-stricken * and * abject poverty *. Nothing else in the world is abject but poverty as far as I've ever seen.
There is so much more to describe, I'm sure the contents of all those piles of garbage would tell me quite a bit. And they are piles, becuase people (mostly but not always women) use whisk brooms to sweep dust, fallen leaves, and garbage into piles, and sprinkle water on the ground as well.