Bengaluru's talent magnet comes with a health cost, says Delhi founder

Abhilasha Purwar arrived in Bengaluru with the kind of professional curiosity that draws investors to India's startup capital. Two weeks later, she left depleted—not by the work, but by the city itself.

Purwar, an investor with Hunch Ventures & Investments and former CEO of Blue Sky Analytics, had come to study the ecosystem. What she found impressed her deeply. The founders she met, the product managers, the engineers—they operated at a different altitude than their Delhi counterparts. The conversations about growth, technology, revenue models, business development: all of it felt sharper, more seasoned, more fluent. She found herself comparing them not to the average founder in her Delhi network, but to the top ten percent, and still the Bengaluru talent seemed to pull ahead. Every event she attended, every person she spoke with, seemed to confirm what the startup world already knows: Bengaluru is where the country's best technical minds congregate.

But there was a cost to proximity. Purwar spent her two weeks moving between Indiranagar, Koramangala, HSR, and APR—a relatively compact circuit by any reasonable measure. The distances between these neighborhoods are not vast. A journey from Koramangala to HSR, she noted, should take twenty minutes. Koramangala to Koramangala, fifteen. Yet these short trips left her physically wrecked. Getting to and from RMZ Ecoworld, despite the business district's appealing surroundings, exhausted her in ways she struggled to articulate. By the end of her stay, she was at what she described as the worst health and fatigue of her entire year—worse than the Jaipur-Delhi-Dehradun corridor, worse than the Delhi-San Francisco route, both of which she travels regularly.

The paradox gnawed at her. Here was a city that had managed to concentrate the highest density of startup talent in the country, yet it had failed to build the infrastructure to move those talented people efficiently. The question felt almost rhetorical: Why would a city that attracts such concentrated human capital allow its transportation systems to deteriorate to the point where moving across it becomes a health event?

Purwar's frustration pointed to something deeper than traffic complaints. She recognized what she called the 'pull effect'—the magnetic draw of being near other talented people, so powerful that professionals choose to endure daily logistical suffering simply to remain in proximity to the ecosystem. Everyone in Bengaluru, she observed, is choosing to suffer through Bengaluru in order to be close to everyone else in Bengaluru. It is a rational choice made irrational by circumstance, a kind of collective acceptance of dysfunction in exchange for access.

Yet she was not ready to leave. Despite the physical toll, despite the infrastructure failures, she wanted to find a way to remain close to the city's startup world. Her final question, posed with a mix of genuine curiosity and dark humor, captured the bind: What supplements are people taking to survive this? The question was not entirely facetious. It suggested that endurance in Bengaluru had become less a matter of urban planning and more a matter of personal resilience—a problem that individuals were expected to solve for themselves rather than one the city would solve for them.