For a Sunday morning drive sometime in May 2023, the busy Outer Ring Road in Bengaluru seemed much more congested than usual. Vehicles were coming from everywhere and spilling into and out of this main road, and what was surreal was that this congestion was without the usual levels of nudging, shoving, shouting, and scraping on the road. For one, the road was crawling with traffic police, being, I should add, ably assisted by burly Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) party workers. For another, it was one among Narendra Modi's several visits to the state as part of his campaigning for the assembly elections, and so it looked like everyone knew the reason behind the congestion and everyone seemed resigned to it, happily or otherwise. Modi was going to go through one of the perpendicular roads as part of his Bengaluru road show.

And as is typical of most Bengaluru drivers, I also took the chance of exiting the main road, into the narrow alleyways, hoping that I could get to another road that I presumed would be out of the vicinity of the road show. At the end of this alleyway maze, I suddenly found myself in the middle of a much wider road, again overflowing with cops and BJP party workers. With no traffic around, strangely, they casually gave me a glance as if my car was intruding upon something. Clearly it looked like I was.

I found myself on the road that Modi's procession had just crossed barely a few minutes ago, and those public officials were possibly breathing a sigh of relief when my car came in as an unwelcome pull back to reality. It was very quiet, with absolutely no traffic on the road.