Another hot, sultry day in Delhi. The thermometer reads 105 degrees. Smoke and dust fill the air and choke the lungs. Streets and sidewalks buckle with people. Twenty two million of them, give or take a few. More arrive daily from towns and villages, squeezing into sprawling shantytowns, the willy-nilly brown blight that seems to creep hourly into what's left of the surrounding countryside.

A donkey plods along on the divided highway that channels people into the maze of Old Delhi, in the wrong direction! A family of five clings to a motor scooter, toddlers dangling, colorful clothes flapping in the breeze. Buses start and stop, crammed with people and their blank stares. Scruffy kids dart in and out of traffic, hands extended for a handout. Sacred cows graze in garbage heaps, alongside goats, pigs, and feral dogs. They slowly chew their cud of stale produce and paper.

But mostly in Delhi there are people, smelly, inescapable, scurrying to and fro, like molecular motion. A suffocating mass of humanity. People walking, talking, squatting, smoking, and sleeping. People riding and herding animals. People urinating, defecating, and spitting, coating the city with a patina of filth and disease.

Also in Delhi are hospitals, bloated with the sick. No wonder!

Mother and daughter share a private moment of ritual ablutions in crowded India. A nation of a billion people, most of them poor, India is expected to increase to 1.6 billion by mid-century. Then, for the first time in history, India, not China, will have the dubious distinction of being the world's most populous nation.