Tension between Hindus and Muslims is still common in India, and has deepened in recent years. To some Hindus, Muslims will never truly be part of Indian society. Violence between the two groups has a long history, and still continues today.
Public transport in India is often desperately overcrowded, and with bus passengers sharing cramped seats, jostling for standing room and sometimes hanging from doorways and sitting on rooves.
bus - Credit: Bernard Gagnon
In big cities, India's middle and upper classes often live behind gates. Luxury gated developments, often with their own facilities including schools and shops, sit cheek-by-jowl with the slums. The residents of the gated communities need hardly leave them, and when they do will often by driven by chauffeur.
As elsewhere in India, homelessness is common in Delhi, with whole families living on the streets, cooking, eating and sleeping in the open.
They often survive by begging and hawking.
Middle class Indians often drift between Hindi and English, and their own state language where that is not Hindi. Indian English can be seen as a separate dialect of English, peppered with phrases and sentence structures not seen in standard English.
India's shopping malls, like the gated communities, are socially divisive. Malls have become incresasingly popular among India's middle classses, and many are huge, towns within towns.