New Delhi, April 1 -- Back in 1984, Rakesh Sharma, India's first astronaut, looked down at his homeland from space and summed it up with a line from Muhammad Iqbal's poem, "Saare Jahaan Se Accha" - when then prime minister Indira Gandhi asked him in Hindi: "How does India look from space?". Fast forward four decades, and Sunita Williams, an Indian-origin NASA astronaut who recently returned from 286 days aboard the International Space Station (ISS), was asked s similar question.

On Monday, when a journalist asked Sunita Williams how India looked from up there, she didn't miss a beat. "Indian is amazing, just amazing," she said while describing the breathtaking view of the Himalayas from space.

"Every time we went over the Himalayas, we ...