Forty eight hours after the blasts, it’s not lost on anyone why the bombers chose Hyderabad, that living mosaic of people and cultures which now rivals Bangalore as the country’s software and services-outsourcing hub. Because the target was not Hyderabad, it was India.

The blasts at Lumbini Park and Gokul Chaat Bhandar were directed at all — from a group of 60 tourists from Tamil Nadu to a group of 45 students from a Maharashtra engineering college, from Muslims to Hindus, from the Saki Naka boy chasing an MBA dream to the village boy who joined college simply because he loved mathematics.

Outside the casualty ward of the Medicity Hospital, 12 boys from states across India — Maharashtra to Jharkhand, UP to Haryana — have been on vigil ever since Saturday night when their injured friends were brought there. The boys say they will not leave because their friends, Hyderabad Central University MCA student Anirudh Kumar from Ranchi in Jharkhand and university alumni Ashwani Kumar from UP, “have no close relatives here”.

On Monday, there were heart-rending scenes in cities and towns across the country as the dead were brought home. Here are snapshots of some of those who fell victim:

• Training programme cut short

Madhya Pradesh railway engineers M K Jain and Ibrahim Khan were among 18 engineers sent to Hyderabad from Jabalpur, Kota and Bhopal divisions. They were being trained in microprocessor-based speedometers for diesel locomotives. Colleagues P K Shukla and R K Chaudhary were injured in the blasts.

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