As an 11 year-old who left India to settle in the UK after spending just two years in the country, Monisha Rajesh’s biggest regret remains that she never saw, say, the Charminar, and “never watched India go by as a wide-eyed tourist.”

So, late in 2009, when 30 year-old Rajesh, a London-based freelance journalist who has worked with Time magazine, read a news piece announcing that an Indian airline planned to connect 80 Indian cities with the rest of the world, she was intrigued. “I wanted to be in all those 80 cities,” she says, over the telephone from her London office.