Published in Indian Express 9th August 2026

I was on the window seat last week, flying into Srinagar, and I was just in awe. The plane had crossed the Pir Panjal range and was descending into the Kashmir Valley, and there it was, an entire geography laid out like something from a film that hasn’t been made yet. Snow on the high ridges even in August, green valleys so vivid they looked like they’d been colour-corrected, the Jhelum River threading through the floor of the valley like a silver nerve, and then Dal Lake appearing in the distance, flat and still, with Srinagar arranged around it like someone had placed a city there very carefully.

And here’s the thing that makes this view even more unusual: you can’t capture it. Photography and videography are prohibited below 10,000 feet on the Srinagar approach and at the airport itself. Security reasons. Which means this is one of the last great travel views on earth that you can only experience with your eyes. No Instagram reel, no phone pressed against the glass, no proof for anyone else. Just you and the window and a valley that looks like it was designed to be seen exactly this way, from above, in silence, with nothing to do but look.

I’ve flown into cities all over the world. I’ve seen the approach into New York, the descent into Hong Kong, the first glimpse of Sydney Harbour from the air. And I’ll say this without hesitation: the approach into Srinagar, on a clear day, from the right seat, is as good as any of them. Maybe better, because you can’t hide behind a camera. You have to actually be there for it.

That flight got me thinking about something we don’t talk about enough. India, seen from 35,000 feet, is one of the most visually spectacular countries on earth. And most of us fly over it with the window shade down, watching a film we have already seen, completely unaware of what’s happening on the other side of that plastic panel.

The Valley That Appears

Let me stay with Srinagar for a moment, because it deserves more than a passing mention. The Mumbai-Srinagar flight is about 3 hours. For the first two, you’re over the Indo-Gangetic plain, flat, agricultural, unremarkable from the air. Then the Shivalik foothills begin, and the terrain starts folding. Within minutes, you are over the Pir Panjal range, and the landscape transforms entirely. Brown rock, white snow, deep gorges, and the kind of scale that makes you understand why the Himalayas have their own mythology.

And then, the valley. The Kashmir Valley doesn’t reveal itself gradually. It appears. One moment you are looking at mountains, and the next there’s a perfectly flat, impossibly green floor between the ranges, and the plane is dropping towards it. On a clear morning, the light catches the rice paddies and the whole valley glows. Dal Lake comes into view, and you can see the shikaras as tiny dark lines on the water. It looks like a painting you’d dismiss as unrealistic if you saw it in a gallery. The seat you want is A, the left side going north. That’s where the Pir Panjal view lives.

Where the Earth Stops Pretending

If Srinagar is beautiful, Leh is otherworldly. Kushok Bakula Rimpochee Airport in Leh sits at 3,256 metres, over 10,600 feet, making it one of the highest commercial airports in the world. The approach is so technically demanding that flights can only land in the morning, when wind conditions are calm and visibility is clear. If the weather doesn’t cooperate, your flight doesn’t go.

But when it does go, and you are on the right side of the plane, what you see is staggering. The flight from Delhi crosses the Shivaliks, then the Pir Panjal, then the Great Himalayan range itself, and then drops into the Trans-Himalayan landscape of Ladakh. A completely different planet. Brown and ochre mountains scored with deep wrinkles, the Indus River glinting far below, snow-capped peaks of the Zanskar and Karakoram ranges in the distance, and not a single tree anywhere. The landscape looks like Mars with better lighting.

Passengers on this flight consistently describe it as the most spectacular domestic flight in India. I would go further. It’s one of the most spectacular short-haul flights anywhere in the world. An hour and a half from Delhi, and you’re landing in a valley surrounded by mountains so bare and ancient they make the Himalayas look young. Left side going to Leh. Don’t sleep.

Where the Ocean Changes Colour

Now go the other direction entirely. Chennai or Kolkata to Port Blair is a two-hour flight over the Bay of Bengal, and for most of it, you see nothing but grey-blue water. It’s easy to zone out, put on headphones, close the shade. Don’t.

About twenty minutes before landing, the Andaman archipelago appears below you, and the colour of the ocean shifts. It goes from deep navy to turquoise to pale green in bands so distinct they look like someone drew lines on the water. The islands emerge as dark green shapes rimmed with white sand, surrounded by coral reefs visible from cruising altitude. It’s the moment you realise the Andamans are closer to Thailand than to mainland India, and that they look like it.

The final descent into Port Blair takes you over tiny islands you’ll never visit, each one fringed with beaches that could be on a postcard. The runway at Veer Savarkar Airport is lined with teak forest on one side and turquoise water on the other. You land feeling like you have already had the first experience of your holiday before the wheels have touched the ground.

The City That Glitters

Mumbai doesn’t have mountains or turquoise water. What Mumbai has is drama, from the air, at night, and in broad daylight.

On a night approach, coming in from the north or east, the first thing you see is a vast darkness, the coast, the sea, and then, suddenly, a carpet of light. Mumbai from the air at night is endless. It stretches in every direction, orange and white and flickering, and it doesn’t seem to stop. You can pick out the curve of Marine Drive, the Queen’s Necklace, as a string of amber lights tracing the shoreline. You can see the Bandra-Worli Sea Link as a lit thread across dark water. On a clear night, you can make out the difference between South Mumbai’s dense glow and the sparser lights of the northern suburbs.

But the view I want to talk about is the one on takeoff. If you are flying out of Mumbai and you are sitting on the left side, look down as the plane climbs and banks over the Arabian Sea. What you will see is the entire western edge of Mumbai stitching itself together. The Sea Link sweeping across Mahim Bay, and then, the Coastal Road crawling along the shoreline, connecting Worli to Marine Drive in a ribbon of concrete and tarmac that didn’t exist a few years ago. From the air, you can see the full ambition of it: the reclaimed land, the tunnels disappearing into the hillside at Malabar Hill, and the way the new road draws a continuous line from Bandra all the way down to the southern tip of the city. It’s Mumbai rewriting its own coastline in real time, and the only place you can see the full picture is from the window of a departing flight.

I have flown out of Mumbai hundreds of times, and I still lean into the window. Our city pulls you in even as you leave it.

The Flights Nobody Talks About

These are the headline approaches, the ones any frequent flyer will nod at. But India has dozens of routes where the window seat tells a story most passengers miss, and half the trick of good travel is learning to look down before you land.

Bagdogra, the gateway to Darjeeling and Sikkim, where on a clear day Kanchenjunga, the third highest mountain on earth, fills the entire horizon as you descend. It's not in the distance. It's right there, massive and white, closer than you expect a mountain that size to be. Most passengers are busy collecting their bags, and they miss the ten seconds when the clouds part and the whole Himalayan wall rises up beside the aircraft.

Mumbai to Goa, where the Western Ghats drop sharply to the Konkan coast and you can see the transition from mountain to plateau to coastline to beach in a single glance. Flown low on a small aircraft, the same stretch gives you a geology lesson in forty-five minutes: green hills give way to laterite plateaus, the plateaus break into river valleys, and then the land simply ends in a ribbon of white sand.

Dibrugarh in Assam, where the Brahmaputra stretches so wide from the air that it looks less like a river and more like a moving sea, with sandbars and islands that shift with every monsoon. Fly this route twice in a year and you may not recognize the river below you the second time.

Jodhpur, where the Blue City earns its name from the air. The old city shimmers in shades of blue and white, compressed inside the walls of Mehrangarh Fort, looking like someone spilled paint on the desert. Rooftops and courtyards form a cool blue puzzle against the tan of the Thar.

And Udaipur, where the lakes, Pichola, Fateh Sagar, Swaroop Sagar, appear as jewels in the brown Aravallis, the white palaces on their shores visible even from cruising altitude, a reminder that this is a city built as much around water as around stone.

My Argument for the Window Seat

Here’s what I keep coming back to. Travellers will pay two lakhs for a Switzerland trip to see mountains, four lakhs for New Zealand to see landscapes, and eight lakhs for Iceland to see dramatic geology. And then they will fly over the Pir Panjal range, or the Western Ghats, or the Brahmaputra delta, with the shade down.

India’s geography, seen from the air, is absurdly varied. In a country this size, you can fly over snow-capped Himalayan peaks, desert cities, volcanic islands, tropical coastlines, river deltas, and dense forest, all on domestic routes, all for the price of a two-hour flight.

The window seat isn’t just a seat preference. On the right Indian route, on the right day, it’s the first, and sometimes the best, experience of the destination.

So the next time you book a flight, pick the window. Know which side to sit on. And keep the shade up. You are already flying over one of the most beautiful countries in the world. You might as well look. See you next week…