Local train bombing survivor misses Mumbai’s lifeline, seeks empathy not sympathy

A survivor of the 2006 Mumbai train blasts, Chirag Chauhan, remembers the local train not with a heavy heart of a victim, but with the fond nostalgia of a Mumbaikar who simply misses his city's lifeline.

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On July 11, 2006, as a 21-year-old Chartered Accountancy student, Chauhan was on his way home when a bomb ripped through his train, forever changing his life as the blast left him with a spinal cord injury, confining him to a wheelchair.

While many of his friends and family members saw this as a monumental tragedy, Chauhan, now a successful Chartered Accountant having his own firm, saw it as the beginning of a different, and in many ways, more fulfilling journey.

“I used to wish that I had missed the train that day, but then I realised whatever destiny has in store is going to happen,” he told PTI, with a calm that belies the horror he survived.

He had left work early that day, something he didn't usually do. It was an unusual decision that placed him on a train with a bomb just two to three feet away from him.

The bomb exploded between between Khar and Santacruz stations. While many on the train that day didn't survive, Chauhan somehow did.

Seven blasts occurred at different locations in the Western line of the city's local trains within a span of 15 minutes, killing over 180 persons and injuring several others on July 11, 2006.