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In defense of Bengaluru

The city has a long tradition of entrepreneurship. That, laced with openness and accessibility, is Bengaluru's heartbeat, and why founders thrive there. It is not about the infrastructure, it is about the kinship

By Suveen Sinha Editor, Forbes India

Published: Jun 19, 2025 11:02:03 AM IST

Updated: Jun 19, 2025 11:54:08 AM IST

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Kunal Shah, who lives 400 metres from his office in Indiranagar, says he rides a Vespa scooter to work. When I raise my eyebrows to question why—400 metres in Bengaluru’s weather would be a quick and pleasant walk—he says with a disarming shrug that it is because he is always running late.

That means our meeting does not begin with a discussion about Bengaluru’s traffic. And that is a refreshing change. Last week in the city, every meeting I went to began with a discussion about Bengaluru’s traffic. At some point during the opening, warm-up chatter, the city’s benign weather would also come up, but more in the manner of a small compensation for the city’s creaking civic infrastructure.

The traffic talk is not entirely unwarranted. To give you a glimpse, a two-kilometre car ride on a Tuesday in the heart of the city took 22 minutes, although it was quite early, at 7.45 in the morning. Still, to see the city through the traffic lens is doing it grave injustice.

Honestly, this is a city unlike any other. Our country has many great cities, from ancient to medieval to modern. Each has its own identity and charm. Bengaluru’s charm strikes different because of its sense of community among everyone related in some way to startups.

Mumbai is transactional, where the common person’s life still runs according to the local train’s timetable. In the commercial capital, your worth depends on what is it that you can get done. Delhi is more expansive, literally and metaphorically, but its old stereotype is not wrong. In the political capital, you are who you are because of whom you know. Bengaluru, too, is about knowing the right people, but it is not about the clout that comes from knowing them. It is more about a sense of community and a shared feeling of kinship. As many say, if you are a founder in Bengaluru facing a problem, help always comes, often from unexpected quarters. And it is not just about funding (though that comes as well), but a word here and there, a meeting to revive the spirits, a word of advice—someone does something and things begin to move again.

Strangely, several Bengaluru residents seem to be oblivious of this and, instead, talk about the traffic and the weather. In many of the aforementioned meetings, I found myself defending the city. I would speak about its long tradition of entrepreneurship, starting with the early wave of tech founders (NR Narayan Murthy, for instance) and how they demonstrated a successful model of the middle class, non-business-family entrepreneur who would happily share their wealth. That long tradition, laced with openness and accessibility, is Bengaluru’s heartbeat.

That is why founders thrive there. So much so that some big names moved from Mumbai and Gurugram to Bengaluru. It is not about the infrastructure, it is about kinship.

And then came the fateful evening when I did not feel like defending Bengaluru anymore. On the day we had our event with Accel to celebrate India’s artificial intelligence leaders, 11 people died and 60 were injured because they wanted to celebrate a victory that took 18 attempts. In other words, it came after 17 failures.

I could have defended the city by saying this is its culture. Founders take failures in their stride. But there comes a time when you do not feel like rationalising anymore. This was one of those times.

Suveen Sinha

Editor, Forbes India

Email: [email protected]

X ID: @suveensinha

(This story appears in the 27 June, 2025 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)