Delhi is closing. Not for a holiday or a funeral, but for a talk shop.

This week, the city’s high-security zones are turning into a velvet-roped fortress for the latest AI Summit. It’s the usual crowd. You’ve got the venture capitalists in Allbirds, the government ministers looking for a photo-op, and a parade of tech executives who’ll spend three days talking about "alignment" while their motorcades misalign the entire city’s commute.

But there’s a catch. This isn't just another weekend of networking and lukewarm catering. The summit’s schedule has slammed head-first into the Board Exams.

For the uninitiated, these exams are the closest thing India has to a secular religion. They’re high-stakes. They’re stressful. They’re the singular hinge upon which a teenager’s future swings. And this year, those teenagers aren't just fighting the physics syllabus—they’re fighting a city that has decided a tech conference is more important than their transit.

The police have already issued the warnings. "Plan ahead," they say. "Use the metro," they suggest. It’s the kind of advice that sounds great in a press release but falls apart when you’re sitting in a stationary rickshaw three miles from the exam center while a convoy of black SUVs screams past. The security protocols are heavy. We’re talking about drone bans, multi-layered checkpoints, and road closures that turn a ten-minute drive into a ninety-minute odyssey.

It’s a classic Delhi trade-off. The government wants to show the world it’s a hub for the future. It wants the optics of being at the center of the "intelligence revolution." But the cost of those optics is being paid by sixteen-year-olds with sharpened pencils and panic attacks.

Inside the air-conditioned halls of the venue, the talk will be about how AI can solve the world’s most pressing problems. They’ll discuss optimizing traffic flow with neural networks. They’ll debate the ethics of automated decision-making. The irony is thick enough to choke on. While they discuss the theoretical efficiency of a "smart city," the actual city outside is gridlocked because of their presence. They’re solving problems that don’t exist yet while creating new ones for the kids who are supposed to be the engineers of tomorrow.

Let’s talk about the friction. You have a specific conflict here: the digital elite versus the physical reality of a developing metropolis. The summit’s security bill is likely sitting in the millions of dollars. That’s a lot of cash for a weekend of "thought leadership" that usually ends in a non-binding memorandum of understanding. Meanwhile, a single late arrival at an exam center can disqualify a student for a year.

It’s a lopsided gamble. If the summit goes well, a few more data centers get built. If a kid misses their math paper because a bridge was closed for a "VVIP" movement, their life trajectory shifts. The tech bros like to talk about "disruption." They usually mean disrupting a market or a business model. In Delhi this week, they’re just disrupting the lives of people who don't have the luxury of a private chauffeur or a police escort.

The city's digital infrastructure isn't helping much, either. Maps aren't great at predicting sudden security cordons. The apps might tell you the road is clear, but they won’t tell you a sub-inspector has decided to block the turn-off with a concrete barricade because a junior minister is ten minutes away. It’s a failure of the very tech being celebrated—a reminder that no matter how many LLMs you train, a physical piece of yellow police tape is still the ultimate algorithm.

Delhiites are used to this, of course. We’ve been conditioned to accept that our time is worth less than the time of whoever is sitting in the back of a car with a flag on the hood. We’ve seen it during the G20, and we’re seeing it again now. The city is being hollowed out for a performance.

So, as the delegates sip their artisanal coffee and talk about "human-centric" technology, thousands of parents will be waking up at 5:00 AM to navigate a maze of detours. They’ll be white-knuckling steering wheels, praying that the "security curbs" don't include the specific flyover they need to cross.

It’s a funny thing about the future. Everyone wants to build it, but nobody seems to care if the people who actually have to live in it can get to school on time.

If AI is supposed to make us smarter, why does the lead-up to this summit feel so incredibly stupid?