If you were among the thousands who got stuck in Bangalore's traffic yesterday, you are probably cursing Deve Gowda and his sons. The JD(S) took out a rally that made life miserable for children returning from school, passengers headed for the airport, patients rushing to hospital, and for everyone who happened to be on the road last evening.

On radio this morning, even as I write, listeners are talking about how they were inconvenienced yesterday. Children who reach home by 5 pm didn't till 10 pm. They were traumatised, so were their parents. Passengers missed their flights and trains. Six hours is a terribly long time to be stuck in a traffic jam. But if you think Deve Gowda is going to be upset by all this criticism about how he held Bangalore to ransom, you don't understand him, or his politics.

Every time something like this happens, the city sorts, especially its professional class, starts screaming that political rallies should be banned. But look at it this way: do city dwellers ever support something like a farm loan waiver? Are we sympathetic to their cause? If we aren't concerned about them, why should we expect them to be concerned about us on their rare visit to the city? Many wouldn't even be able to make a trip to a big city like Bangalore if it weren't for some party giving them a lorry ride and handing them their lunch packets.

City dwellers and village people see themselves as enemies, even if they occasionally have to talk to each other.  Aravind Adiga's Booker-winning book The White Tiger tells the village-versus-city story in a dark and deadpan style. People who attended Deve Gowda's rally couldn't have been too well disposed towards city dwellers who take away their land, their water, and their self-respect.

Here's another irony: City slickers who are calling up the radio station to sound off about the rally are being rewarded with gift vouchers to a slimming centre. The poor who came out to support Deve Gowda might have a less expensive solution to urban obesity: "Come live with us and see what life is like in our villages!"