The Man on the Treadmill

He kept the email. He lost the ticket.In 2003, Krishna Byre Gowda flew home from Washington for his father's funeral with a return flight still in his pocket. H

He kept the email. He lost the ticket.

In 2003, Krishna Byre Gowda flew home from Washington for his father's funeral with a return flight still in his pocket. He wrote to the firm he worked for asking for a month. Then he wrote again to say he would not be coming back. The correspondence survives in his inbox. The ticket stub is gone. "When you're caught in the thick of things, you don't have the benefit of hindsight," he says now, sounding faintly annoyed at his younger self for failing to save the memorabilia.

Twenty-three years and six consecutive terms later, he is the minister charged with governing a city that has outgrown its own mythology. He is also a certified ocean diver, which is why he reaches for a swimmer's vocabulary when asked what the job feels like: a treadmill that keeps tilting steeper and running faster, and no way to step off. "I have not yet choked," he says. "But it feels like I'm going to choke."

Asked who took Bengaluru's weather away, he does not deflect. "Progress is a process of creative destruction." The city that once needed no fan now runs the highest ratio of vehicles to people in India — which he insists on reading as aspiration, not failure. The first graduate in a poor family buys a two-wheeler, then dreams of a car. That is what arrival looks like. It also has a cost: fragmented families, ruptured relations, an anger on the streets that Bengaluru never used to have.

He will not concede the city's crown — a third of India's GCCs, a quarter of its real estate. But on legacy he asks for very little. Only that nobody says he didn't try.

Watch the full conversation on Expressions