The first time I understood what speed felt like, I was sitting in a bullock cart in Telangana. The cart moved at the pace of the oxen, which is to say it moved at the pace of the world as it had always moved in that part of India. Dirt roads, open sky, the creak of wooden wheels. Nobody was in a hurry. The journey was the thing.

I thought about that cart recently when I read that India just inaugurated two new mega-airports in the same month. The Noida International Airport outside Delhi, backed by a $1.2 billion investment from Zurich Airport, opened on March 28. The Navi Mumbai airport, built by the Adani Group, started operations a few months earlier. Both are designed to handle tens of millions of travelers a year. Both are bets on a country that has more than doubled its air travelers since 2014, now crossing 160 million fliers annually.

The numbers are real. Indian carriers have an order book of over 1,350 new aircraft. A hundred planes are expected to join Indian fleets every year. The infrastructure investment is staggering — bridges, highways, ports, and now airports that are eight times the size of Central Park.

And yet, when I read about all of this, my first thought was not about infrastructure. It was about a seatbelt.

My first flight was when I was 24, Bangalore to Goa. I did not know how to get the seatbelt out. I sat there, quietly embarrassed, until the announcement came on. That was my entire experience of aviation up to that point — watching planes cross the sky from below. In India, you moved by train. That was the understood thing. The train was not a backup to flying. It was how the country traveled.

This was not a failure of imagination. It was history doing what history does. India had always been a traveling civilization. Ancient pilgrims walked thousands of miles for tirtha yatra, the Sanskrit concept of journeying to sacred places. Emperor Ashoka traveled across the subcontinent in the third century BCE, building rest houses and planting trees along roadsides so travelers could find shade. The Silk Road ran through Indian ports and trade routes. Buddhist monks carried ideas from India to China on foot, over the Himalayas. The country was never still. It just moved differently.

The railways, when they arrived in 1853, did not create a traveling culture. They scaled one that already existed. For the first time, crossing from the north to the south did not take months. The pilgrimage centers, the trade hubs, the distant relatives — all of it became reachable. The train democratized movement that had previously belonged only to the devout, the wealthy, or the brave.

I grew up inside that train culture. Inter-city travel in India meant the railway. It meant reserved compartments, platform food, the specific rhythm of a long-distance journey measured in stations rather than miles. I did not travel between cities by air in India. I came to the United States, and suddenly flying between cities was simply what you did.

The airport boom is, in a sense, the train story repeating at altitude. The question is whether demand follows the infrastructure or whether the infrastructure arrives ahead of demand and waits. India has a pattern of building airports in smaller cities that then sit underutilized, half-empty terminals in towns where the train is still faster and cheaper. The ghost airport problem is real. Noida and Navi Mumbai are large enough bets that they will probably generate their own gravity — routes, commerce, commuter patterns built around their existence. But the history of Indian infrastructure ambition includes as many cautionary examples as it does triumphs.

The foreign capital dimension matters too. Zurich Airport's investment in Noida is not just about that one airport. It is a signal about whether India can attract serious overseas money into infrastructure without relying entirely on domestic conglomerates like Adani and Ambani. If Noida underperforms, that conversation gets harder the next time.

I have been thinking about all of this through the lens of my own travel biography, which covers a range I find hard to compress into a single sentence. Bullock cart in Telangana. Overnight trains across peninsular India. First flight at 24, not knowing how the seatbelt worked. And then, years later, standing on the flight deck of USS George H.W. Bush, CVN-77, a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier in the Atlantic, having arrived via a C-2A Greyhound from Naval Air Station Norfolk, wearing a flight helmet and blast goggles, with an F/A-18 Super Hornet being towed twenty feet behind me.

The C-2A Greyhound at Naval Air Station Norfolk, before the flight out to the carrier.

That last one still seems improbable when I write it out. A C-2A Greyhound carrier landing is not a gentle experience. The aircraft catches the arresting wire and goes from roughly 150 miles per hour to zero in about two seconds. You are strapped in facing backward, which is standard for the passenger seats on that aircraft, and the deceleration is total and immediate. It is the opposite of the bullock cart in almost every measurable way — speed, technology, violence of motion — and yet both are just ways of getting from one place to another.

On the flight deck of USS George H.W. Bush (CVN-77) in the Atlantic, November 2013.

The carrier was named after George H.W. Bush, the 41st president, who was himself a naval aviator in the Second World War. He flew TBF Avengers off carriers in the Pacific and was shot down over the Bonin Islands in 1944. There is something I keep returning to about standing on that deck — a person who grew up in Hyderabad, who first flew at 24 without knowing how to buckle a seatbelt, standing on a warship named after one of America's most celebrated aviators. The distance between those two moments is not just biographical. It maps something about what mobility means and who gets access to it.

India's airport boom is really a story about access. The 160 million people flying today are not the same 160 million who flew a generation ago. Budget carriers, tier-2 city routes, the slow erosion of aviation as a class marker — all of it is pushing the country toward something that looks more like the train culture, where travel is simply assumed to be possible rather than reserved for the few.

My grandmother never flew. My parents flew late in life. I flew at 24 and spent twenty years after that accumulating more miles than I can honestly account for. The generation coming up in India now is booking flights on their phones before they finish school.

The bullock cart and the flight deck are not opposites. They are the same instinct — the human need to move, to go somewhere, to see what is on the other side of the distance — expressed through whatever technology the moment makes available. India always understood that instinct. It is just now building the runways to match it.

Shashi Bellamkonda writes about technology, culture, and the occasional carrier landing at readythoughts.com.