During the Tech Summit 2025, astronaut Shubhanshu Shukla made a funny comment about Bengaluru’s famous bad traffic. It quickly became very popular, making people laugh, discuss the issue, and pay more attention to the city’s big problems with getting around.
“Clearing space was easier than Bengaluru’s roads,” a room full of top industry leaders, innovators and government officials heard at the closing session of the Bengaluru Tech Summit 2025, with astronaut Shubhanshu Shukla drawing guffaws from the crowd. Bengaluru motorists and frequent commuters, of course, winced.
Shukla, a Group Captain in the Indian Air Force and one of the six astronauts selected for India’s first manned mission to space, Gaganyaan, was speaking at a session of the “Future Makers Conclave,” hosted as part of the three-day summit. He revealed that while the road commute from his home in Marathahalli to the summit venue, the Bangalore International Exhibition Centre (BIEC), had taken him thrice as long as his allotted time to speak.
“You have to appreciate the commitment,” he joked, alluding to the relative ease of blasting off from Earth’s gravity but the challenge of arriving on time in Bengaluru.
The joke drew laughs from the crowd, but there was a serious edge to it: Bengaluru is known to have some of the worst traffic in India’s Silicon Valley’ – even for a pilot who has been training for years to go to space.
The reference resonated not just with the audience in the room, though. Earlier in his speech, Karnataka’s IT minister Priyank Kharge had pounced on the astronaut’s joke to assure the crowd that the government was taking the issue seriously and making sure that commuters never have to make such a long journey again.
The elephant in the room was a big one. The Bengaluru Tech Summit, in its third edition and spread over three days, was one of the biggest such events in the city, with around 30,000 delegates from over 50 countries participating. Sessions spanned AI, biotech, aerospace, deep-tech and other themes in locations where Bengaluru needs to stay relevant, globally.
Still, the chuckle-inducing truth about the traffic for Bengaluru’s top civic leaders and leaders of industry provided an important reminder: High-tech ambitions need corresponding infrastructure to back it up.
“Space was easier,” summed up Shukla, talking about his experience to get to the summit. For a city that brands itself as the future of tech, that may sting – but it can also be the first step to a solution. If the roads of Bengaluru are challenging even for a man who has trained for years to reach space in Gaganyaan, perhaps it’s time for a wholesale rethinking of urban mobility.
What next? Signs of action, at least in intent, are on the cards. Kharge’s own acknowledgment that there is a problem in Bengaluru is at least a start. Traffic, until now treated as part of the daily grind with little importance, could get some overdue attention as a key issue, even in India’s hubs of innovation and tech. Whether the city’s response will be smarter transit, better roads or a creative new solution is yet to be seen.
All in all, the joke was not just a joke. It was a wakeup call: when travel from home to a tech summit seems harder than going to space, it’s time to take a long, hard look at the machine that powers the commute.
