The New Hot Job in India: Flight Attendant

Travel Blog • Michael Yessis • 02.27.07 | 7:21 AM ET

The country’s travel industry is growing so fast—50 percent last year, according to the Indian government—that Indians are clamoring to pursue careers in aviation. Indian women, in particular, are beneficiaries of the boom. “Until recently, many Indian families would have frowned on the idea of a young woman dressing in a short skirt and serving strangers on a plane,” Somini Sengupta writes in the New York Times. “But a rapidly expanding economy has helped to transform the ambitions, habits and incomes of India’s middle class in ways that would have been unimaginable just a generation ago, not least for young women.”