The 10-Minute Commute That Bought Me 18 Years of Freedom

Most IT professionals in Bangalore will tell you the secret to career success is to jump companies every two years, chase the 40% salary hike, and never get too comfortable. They are not wrong. But they are not entirely right either.

I did the opposite. And I have zero regrets.

I came to Bangalore after my MCA, like thousands of others who land in this city every year with a degree, a duffel bag, and an outsized ambition. Did my time in a couple of companies. Then joined a Canadian MNC and stayed there for eighteen years. Eighteen. In an industry where people treat job loyalty like a character flaw.

People ask me why. The honest answer is not noble. It is not about culture fit or mission alignment or any of the language people use on LinkedIn. The answer is ten minutes.

Ten minutes from home to office. Ten minutes from office to home.

That is it. That is the whole story. Except it is also not.

When I moved to Marathahalli — close to where my office sits — I did not fully understand what I was doing. It felt like a practical decision. Marriage had happened. Life was getting more structured. Koramangala was getting more expensive and more chaotic. The math made sense to move closer.

What I did not anticipate was what that proximity would do to everything else.

While my colleagues were spending two to three hours a day inside Bangalore’s legendary traffic — burning fuel, burning cortisol, burning the best hours of their mental energy before they even opened a laptop — I was already home. Already fed. Already thinking about the next thing.

That next thing was always a business.

The entrepreneurial keeda has been inside me since I drew my first salary. From 2005 onwards, I have started businesses in Bangalore with money I did not really have. Credit cards. Personal loans. Salary advances. Every rupee I could put to work, I put to work. Some of it burned spectacularly. Some of it built something real for a while before falling apart. I even bought a house in Bangalore and had to sell it later to cover business losses. That sentence alone should tell you what kind of ride it has been.

But here is the thing about serial entrepreneurship that nobody talks about — it requires time. Not just capital, not just courage. Time to think, to build, to fail, to understand why you failed, and to pivot before you lose everything. That time is not available when you are sitting bumper to bumper on Outer Ring Road for ninety minutes every morning, watching your willpower evaporate before the workday even begins.

My ten-minute commute gave me that time. And then COVID came and reduced even that to two or three days a week. The runway got longer. The thinking got deeper.

I am in my late forties now. Working in fashion tech. Planning to retire in five years and go full-time into the business I have been building — the one that is supposed to earn double what my salary does before I walk out. The increments over eighteen years have all been single digits. I did not climb the corporate ladder aggressively. I did not interview elsewhere. I did not play the salary negotiation game the way my peers did.

They are ahead of me on paper. Some of them significantly. But many of them also spent those same years commuting, exhausted, with nothing left to build after they got home. Their entire professional energy went into the job. Mine went into the job and into what came after.

I am not claiming my path is superior. I have lost serious money in failed businesses. I carry the weight of those losses. Entrepreneurship did not make me rich. It made me relentless and occasionally broke. What it gave me is a foundation — a real one, built over two decades of skin in the game — that I am now preparing to stand on fully.

Here is the advice I give anyone in Bangalore who will listen, especially those in IT:

Stop optimising only for the salary hike. Start optimising for the life hike.

If you are spending three hours a day in traffic, you are not just losing time. You are losing the mental space where ideas live. You are losing the energy that startups are built on. You are losing the version of yourself that could have been doing something meaningful in those hours instead of inching forward on Hosur Road.

The best investment I made in this city was not a stock, not a property, not a business. It was moving near my office.

If you have found a stable job — a real one, not a stepping stone — consider planting your life close to it. Not because you should stop being ambitious. Because proximity to your workplace is what funds ambition. It returns to you the one resource no salary hike ever will: hours.

Use those hours to build something. Fail at it. Learn from it. Fail again. That education has a cost, but it is the only education that actually prepares you for what comes after the job ends.

And the job always ends.

Bangalore will consume you if you let it. The traffic, the chaos, the social pressure to look like you are always moving up — it will take everything and leave you with a good salary and an empty tank.

Or you can choose differently.

Ten minutes. That is what changed my life. Not a promotion. Not a job switch. Not a venture capital cheque.

Just ten minutes and the discipline to use what they gave me.

The author is a serial entrepreneur, blogger, and IT professional based in Bangalore, currently working in the fashion tech industry and building toward a full-time transition into his own ventures.

Thoughts? If you have spent years in Bangalore traffic and made a life decision around it — or wish you had — I want to hear it.

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