Bangalore, May 10: As exasperating as in Bengal, sometimes. But on the whole a breeze, if a tad flashy.

That, in a nutshell, is the Bangalore Bengali’s verdict on v-day: the first phase of voting in the Karnataka polls.

Ask Barun Chatterjee. The software professional went to the polling booth but found his name deleted from the voters’ list. A surprise, yes, but hardly a shock to a former Calcuttan. Hundreds of Bangaloreans, ID cards in pocket, shared Chatterjee’s plight, forced to leave the booth because they were not on the rolls.

For Chatterjee, the other, and more pleasant, surprise was the peaceful polling. “Elections are a time for violence in Bengal. I have been caught between police and party activists several times. My parents always pleaded with me not to vote but I still would,” Chatterjee said of his student days in Calcutta.

Hindustan Aeronautics employee U. Biswas agreed. For him, the welcome break from the “Bong connection” was that he managed to complete voting in 10 minutes.

“We have something called ‘booth-jamming’ back home. We stand in queue for hours but the line would hardly move since fake voters keep joining at its mouth. Most genuine voters get tired of waiting and leave. This doesn’t happen here. The entire voting process took me less than 10 minutes,” Biswas said.

Public sector employee S.K. Mandal, who has watched polling closely in Calcutta, Nainital and Bangalore, says the other difference between Bengal and Karnataka is the way the politicians dress.

“In Calcutta, I have seen many with a lot of integrity but in Karnataka, the politicians are rich and flashy — they wear white khadi silk and even matching white shoes.”

The comrades in Bengal — even Mamata Banerjee’s men — would squirm at the thought of wearing anything snazzier than their crisp, white dhoti-panjabi on voting day.

Bangalore, with a population of six million, has around two lakh Bengalis, most of them working in IT or in PSUs.

Karnataka recorded around 60 per cent voting today but the urban areas witnessed a poor turnout of 44 per cent. Calcutta fared better in the 2006 state polls, with around 63 per cent.

Media executive B.B. Dutta was among those Bengalis in Bangalore who mirrored the indifference of the urban population. “My name is on the rolls but I wasn’t interested in voting this time,” he said, offering no reason like the many other Bangaloreans who failed to turn up.

There are also some like private sector executive Dwaipayan Chatterjee, who has not got his name deleted from the voter list in Calcutta.

“I’m a frequent traveller and couldn’t find the time to include my name (on the Karnataka rolls),” the Mysore-based executive said. There is no time limit on inclusion of one’s name on the voter list in one’s city of residence — all it takes is deletion from the previous list.