Seems people are too hooked to Diwali. It has been more than 8 months since the festival has gone by but crackers still seems to be flavor of the day.
Yesterday there were 8 blasts in the green city followed by double the number in Ahmedabad. the best was that all the blasts were of low intebsity and the human loss has been marginal. Best in the sense that that the loss of human lives is catastrophic and sends ripple of panic across the city. One of the blasts, as I read was so timid that people did not even realise that the blast has happened and notified the police of the same only after the news of serial blast started filtering into the media.
The news of the blast came in while we were enjoying our lunch at a salad bar and the basking in the self proclaimed glory of ’satvik’ and healthy food. One call changed the mood altogether and everyone got busy on phone, either to call the dear ones to get the news of there whereabouts or calling up their families back home to tell them about ourselves being fit and fine.
What we were surprised about was that the blasts were carried out at a time when the traffic on the road would be less and even the placement of the bombs were not in a building or at a crowded market place where it could have hurt more; needless to say with the intensity of the blasts.
Some of the points of blasts were on my path from office to home and knowing this, i was worried about the barricades erected by the police. We stayed back in office for some time before starting our journey to back home, keeping our fingers crossed. Before leaving the office, we sat down to plan out the route of travel for the day in order to avoid both the impacted area as well as anticipated traffic jams. But I must say, it was one of the smootheset ttraffic i encountered every during that time of the day. The movement seemed so normal and natural to the city that if a person, oblivious to the news of crackers drives through, he would never imagine that while he is driving through those streets, streets not far away are trying to get out of the grip of panic.
Today while i was driving back to home from airport, I was told by my sister that the area near PVR cinemas has been cordoned off due to finding of a bomb. We took a different route and again were stuck at a place. The first this that stuck us was : ‘Could there be another bomb been found here too? Later it came to be known that it was an accident which had resukted in traffic jam. But the effect of the bombs are such that this comes as teh first
I really missed being witness to the blasts man!
