Express balm for Mumbai blast victims

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Mumbai, Mar 31: Their loss can never be compensated, or even entirely comprehended, but 'The Indian Express My Mumbai Trust' just gave 12 of the most dispossessed families left behind by the serial bomb blasts aboard Mumbai's suburban trains fresh reason to hope.

Taking another public service initiative to its logical conclusion, funds raised by the trust in the aftermath of the explosions on July 11, 2006, were disbursed on Monday at The Express Towers in Mumbai.

A K Jhingron, General Manager of Western Railway who handed out the cheques, said: “With the limitations that railways have, there is just this much that the railways could do. It is in the light of this that work by organisations like The Indian Express has helped the victims. We truly appreciate your efforts.”

Soon after the blasts, The Indian Express kicked off '187 Life Stories', a series recounting for readers how these unfortunate Mumbaiites had lived. Every day, for over six months, reporters wrote about the victims, poignant moments in their lives, little puzzles and big dilemmas they'd left behind and how families were coping with the loss of bread-winners.

On Monday, 12 of these families were handed cheques of Rs 2.2 lakhs each. Earlier, the Mumbai Blast Victims Relief Fund of The Indian Express had also helped settle one victim's housing loan, apart from facilitating contributions from generous readers for specific victims' families.

For instance, when one little boy said his father had died without fulfilling his promise to buy a bicycle like the one Hrithik Roshan had in the superhit 'Koyi Mil Gaya' , a reader promptly got the boy the bicycle. Rehana Merchant, wife of 41 years to 72-year-old Shakeer Merchant who died in the blasts, said she still sometimes looks through her collection of clippings of the 187 Life Stories series in The Indian Express . “We can never forget what happened, and the series told us others were grieving as deeply too,” she said after the event.

Interacting with the families after distributing the cheques, Jhingron said that although the railways could not directly help blast widows in raising their children, Western Railway womens' organisations could intervene. He also promised to look into the requests of some of the widows-many of them now employees of WR on which all seven blasts took place.