February 21, 2013.
It was a general catching up call with a photographer friend from Bangalore, talking about assignments, delayed payments, personal work and finding direction. Some 15 minutes into the conversation, I began receiving other calls on my phone. I cut the first few but they simply wouldn’t stop. When people who had otherwise not been int touch for months and even a couple of years called, I knew something was wrong. I told V I will call him right back and cut the call. And almost at the same instant a friend’s message appeared on the screen. “I heard it was a bomb?”
I ran downstairs and my mom, waiting anxiously at the door, gave me the news- there had been a bomb blast in Dilsukhnagar, barely a kilometer or two from where we lived. On a (relatively) calm Sunday evening I could have heard the explosion. Local TV crews had just reached the place and the first visuals were being flashed on TV. I quickly changed into a pair of jeans, picked up my camera and left for Dilsukhnagar. Rajiv Chowk is usually crowded till 10:30 in the night and the bomb blast only made it look more chaotic. I asked someone where the blast took place and I was in for a shock. There were two blasts, not one, at Anand Tiffins and at the bus stop where the buses to Secunderabad leave from.
The second blast site near Anand Tiffins. Continue reading
