I was born in Bombay just over four decades ago. Foreign travel will never recapture the allure it possessed when I was growing up. Those who recall the 1970s will remember that it was very rare to encounter a child who had been abroad, even among India's most wealthy citizens. Economy tickets cost the equivalent of years of earnings, visas were nearly impossible to obtain, and government currency regulations made it very difficult to legally marshal the vital foreign exchange required. The very few exceptionally fortunate among us who did travel – even to nearby countries – basked in the achievement of the unattainable for the rest of their childhood. I remember one classmate who was admiringly referred to as 'Singapore' all the way into college, the rest of us lastingly envious about a trip taken as a toddler.
Even if the prospect of foreign travel was exceedingly remote, however, fevered dreams about it consumed our time. Geography was always a favoured school subject – the lot of us competing furiously to memorise the names of national capitals, American states we had no hope of ever visiting, mighty river systems and mountain ranges. During free periods, my friends and I succumbed to a craze born of poring over atlases and an old wooden globe in the school library, making and remaking lists of the top 10 places in the world that we wanted to visit. I had a huge world map plastered across my bedroom wall, with pins marking out my travel priorities: the Great Wall of China, Luxor, the beaches of Rio de Janeiro, the plains of the Serengeti. Long before I got my first passport, I would think to myself while going to bed every night, One day I will get to all of these destinations.
Unlikely as those childhood dreams might have been, even more improbable is the speed with which they came true. Again the 1970s was the hinge, the tipping-point decade where airlines around the world embraced newly developed 'jumbo jets', widebody aircraft that could each cram in up to 400 passengers. Airfares started to decline, a process that seems to continue irreversibly today, the age of budget airlines.
But even then, travelling from India was neither easy or comfortable, and still completely unaffordable except for the wealthiest few. I was lucky – my unmarried uncle worked at Air India. He carefully hoarded freebies to give to his beloved sister and her brood. Still, that first flight, in 1977, was an unforgettable ordeal that lasted more than a day. We staggered onboard in the middle of the night, and the plane took more than 20 hours to reach London from Bombay, via an extraordinary route including Delhi, Tehran and Moscow.