Lumbini Park or Gokul Chaat - It was India that was blown up
The blasts that rocked Hyderabad was not a local bomb, it hit India hard.
Injured in the blasts were tourists from Tamil Nadu as well as students from Maharashtra. Anxious students outside a city hospital from different states of India waited for their friend, a student of the Central University, as he had no relatives in Hyderabad.
The injured include engineers from Indian Railways sent to Hyderabad for training in microprocessor-based speedometers for diesel locomotives.
The blast knew no religion. One of the dead was 19-year-old Irshad Ahmed, a student of Maharashtra's Amrutvahini College of Engineering, a brilliant electronics engineering student.
Thirty one-year-old K V Ananda Rao was doing super-specialisation in medical oncology at the Nizam's Institute of Medical Sciences in Hyderabad and little did his mother Lalitha Kumari in Orissa's Berhampur realise that his call to her was his last and she had to receive his dead body.
Milind Mandage, son of a school teacher from Pimpri Gawali village in Parner in Maharashtra wanted to drive his mother in an Indica Car, but he was simply blown up in Hyderabad.
19-year-old Sujeet Kumar Jha from Laheriasarai in Bihar's Darbhanga was also a student of the Amrutavahini College of Engineering. His father, an Income Tax lawyer, had taken a loan for Sujeet's studies. Sujeet's body landed up in Patna airport on Monday with no government in sight anywhere near.
Kiran Chaudhari, from the Amrutavahini College of Engineering, was from Kalyan near Mumbai. His sister had posted a rakhi well in advance, confident that Kiran would get it when he returned from Hyderabad. But he didn't!
The blast and SMS:
I rarely see and never reply to SMS messages in my cell phones. On the day of the blast, I received several SMS messages, to which I never replied. My son asked me, "do the senders assume that you have been blown up because you have not replied to their messages?"