The only word I hear my urban, upwardly mobile peers utter with more disdain than 'politics' is 'bandh'.

The loathing is not new. I've grown up in a Kolkata which had long been reduced to a shell of a city, much of its goodness emptied out with the spoon of Marxist propaganda, militant trade unionism, long funeral marches of dead slogans, and the great bandh, an Indian-ism for a total blockade of businesses and transport.