Five hours in the car. Five hours without food, water. Five hours of incessant horns, weak phone signals, frustrated commuters, wailing ambulances, and broken down trucks. And if you look out of your car window to see if the traffic inches forward, you are most likely to spot several posters with JDS leaders smiling(smirking?) at you. For the JDS Rally, it was a huge success. It showed its iron fist and strangled Bangalore.

I happen to live in north Bangalore. For years I gloated over the fact that I’m far from the madding crowd who suffer traffic jams in BTM, Koramangala or Indiranagar. But in the last few years it has changed. And yesterday, any road that leads north was full. Everywhere, I could see busloads of farmers and their families in some vintage buses covered with posters that displayed the smiling JDS leaders.

The ex-CM said that Palace Grounds has always been lucky for them; so they held it here despite the High Court’s rule. Two lucky people and an entire city of unlucky commuters; is there any sense to it? The ruling party is caught in a dilemma on whether to stop such rallies for the citizens’ sake or just keep mum and use the same tactics for the next election. Until someone takes a strong decision, we citizens will always be at the receiving end of such political whims & the understaffed traffic police⊕