Please visit the 08-08-07: Tibetan protest demo in Delhi album at Flickr.

What an amazing day this was - and it just happened to fall on my last day in India.

I joined the masses heading from Majnu ka tila into Jantar Matar (Connaught Place) early, around 7.30. Most of us took the metro and the staff there were pretty good at dealing with the crowds, by allowing groups of monks/nuns and women to buy group tickets and bypass the usual security procedures (metal detectors and bag searches) to head straight into the metro. I was dragged into a group of 20 loud and vocal young women who I found out later were amongst the organising group of the Tibetan Youth Congress. They smilingly grabbed my hand and pulled me through gates and doors and pushed me into a seat on the train.... they were so excited, it was utterly infectious.

We arrived at Jantar Matar just before 8 a.m. and could hear the crowds chanting from the station - there were already several thousand people here, and huge piles of bags, which suggests that many actually slept here. Permission hadn't been given for the march by the Indians at that point, so all we could do was sit and wait in any shade we could find. At times, there was an eerie silence - sitting amongst many thousands of people just waiting quietly, it gave me goosebumps. At other times, there were rallying chants in Tibetan or English.

It was getting really really hot and the crowd was subtly losing hope that the Indians would honour the request to march, when a slow, building whooping cheer spread through the crowd and everyone jumped to their feet and starting waving flags and yelling and laughing! It was an incredible sound - and again, goosebumps. The Indian Gov't had finally given permission.

The organisers quickly swung into action, and the crowds were corralled into one lane of the 4 lane road with songs and chants. And then, they started marching. It wasn't far - just around the corner, onto Janpath, to a much wider avenue where there was a stage with about a dozen speakers. But it was a wonderful sight. So many people. There has never been such a gathering of Tibetans since the invasion..... people were crying. Yes, I was one of them.

At one point, in the midst of the national anthem, there was some commotion down the back of the crowd and people were running towards something. I later found out that a 24 year old man had attempted self-immolation by setting himself alight. The crowds stopped him though, and he was taken to hospital with about 25% of burns to his body. Holy shit. Really glad I didn't see that.

That evening, I turned on the TV in my room to watch coverage of the demo. Surprisingly, there was not a single mention on any of the news channels - not even the BBC, who instead chose to run with the celebrations in Beijing of the excellent progress the Chinese are making with their Olympics preparations. And the next day, at the airport, I scoured the newspapers. A tiny square mentioned a 100 person demonstration near Jantar Mantar protesting the rising use of drugs in India. But nothing about 10 000 + Tibetans marching. Not a single mention.

Heartbreaking.