For first-time visitors, everything you have previously heard or read about India is probably true.  

And the contrary is probably true as well. Home of the world's oldest civilizations, and several of the world's great religions, India has been changing and re-shaping itself for as long as anywhere on earth, forever producing new forms of culture and absorbing new influences.  

The boundaries of modern India , fixed some fifty years ago, are mereley the latest of a four-thousand year sequence of redefinitions that have produced one of the most heterogeneous societies in the world.  

The land where Buddha lived and preached and where the Moghul Muslims ereceted the Taj Mahal has recreated itself as both a majority Hindu nation and the world's largest secular democracy, home to well over one thousand million people.  

Many first-time vistors cannot see past the grinding poverty of the country's most disadvantaged citizens. Others expect a timeless ascetic wonderland and are indignant to find that materialism has its place here too. Still more find themselves intimidated by what may seem, initially, an incomprehensible and bewildering continent.  

Delhi

On first impressions, Delhi , with its jam-packed streets, tower blocks and temples, forts, mosques and colonial mansions can be as disorientating as it is fascinating.  

It certainly takes a while to find your feet as you attempt to weave a path through buses, trucks, nippy modern cars, mopeds, rickshaws, nonchalant cows, bullock carts and hand-pulled trolleys.  

Unlikely juxtapositions are everywhere you look; suit-and-tie businessmen rub shoulders with traditionally dressed orthodox Hindus and Muslims, groups of young Delhi-ites wearing Levi's pile into burger joints, bars and discos, turbaned snake-charmers tease hypnotizing moans out of curved pipes while sadhus smoke their chillums and ragged beggars clutch dusty children, pleading for a little help towards a meal.