• Mr Vilasrao Deshmukh, you must be busy with meetings after meetings, visits after visits.

Yes, the main task before us is to find out who is the culprit behind the blasts. the whole machinery is geared to that.

• But it’s remarkable to see you smiling. Just like Mumbai is buzzing. This station is full and it was here that one of the blasts happened.

That is the spirit of Mumbai. Four-and-a-half hours after the blasts on the Western Line, the service was restarted. That was a great relief and the next morning everything was normal.

• And in 48 hours you are here, the trains are running. Mumbai is back to business.

Absolutely. The blasts were a huge shock to us. I was surprised that such an incident could occur. But I was confident, after seeing the way people reacted and cooperated during the deluge last year, that we’ll be able to bring back normalcy as soon as possible. The spirit of Mumbai is to go on.

• We’ll revisit this notion of the spirit of Mumbai, because I have a complaint on that. But you said it was a surprise. There was talk and even the Prime Minister mentioned that there were indications that something like this could happen.

There was this general alertness. A message had been passed by IB, some warning.

• When was that?

No, it was for the last four five months. I had a meeting with the Home Minister in Delhi, my home minister. There were some specific suggestions to beef up the security apparatus. And the incident at the RSS headquarters, we could have avoided that because of early intelligence input. But so far as this incident is concerned, there was a general warning but not anything specific.

... contd.