So for years the most popular car in India – virtually the only car in India – was the Hindustan Ambassador, essentially an early 1950s Morris Oxford enjoying a spell of Eastern reincarnation. Once upon a time, India tried to make everything for itself, even if zero imports also meant zero exports. As I checked in at the tiny airport at Khajuraho, south-east of Delhi, last year I had to thread my way through a herd of goats to get to the terminal door. However, plenty of airports are still stuck in the past. Standards at some Indian airports have made great leaps forward. These days as you fly around India, you're no longer restricted to the vagaries and discomforts of flying Indian Airlines. Coming back from Surat a couple of days later, I was even more surprised to find that seating lists were still pasted up on the carriage side. You may be able to book train tickets online, but taking a train north from Mumbai to Surat in Gujarat on a recent India trip, I was astonished to be asked to fill out a scrappy paper form, in duplicate, before I was permitted to buy a ticket. India has gone through even more changes than Lonely Planet in those 30 years – although I'm often surprised how much of it, from the point of view of the traveller, has simply stayed the same. Its publication kicked off a period of frenetic growth, and before long we were sending out a stream of writers to cover other "big" destinations. Sales passed the million mark quite a few editions ago. Now, 30 years on, we've arrived at the 14th edition of the India guide – and these days it's an ongoing battle to keep the length from straying too far beyond 1,000 pages. India: A Travel Survival Kit became a critical success as well as a popular one when I shook hands with Lord Hunt, leader of the successful 1953 Everest Expedition, and took home the Thomas Cook Guidebook of the Year award. Fortunately for the financial health of Lonely Planet, it was an instant hit, and our sales doubled almost instantly. We finally got the first books on the shelves in late 1981.