Sumeet Singh still has bomb splinters in his chest and scars of burns on his left leg. But few people know him as a survivor of the bomb blast in German Bakery in Pune in 2010. “I want to forget all that. Whenever people ask me about the burns on my body, I tell them it was a cracker burst during Diwali. I have come out of that phase and want to live a new life. These scars are mine. It is me and I do not want to erase them through plastic surgery,’’ he said, sitting at the conference room of his corporate office in Okhla, Delhi.
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Sumeet, 31, is a principal associate at the law firm Shardul Amarchand Mangaldas & Co, a position very few have achieved so early in the career. He graduated in law from Symbiosis Law School in Pune in 2009 and worked in Aditya Birla Group for about a year. While serving the notice period there, he and his college friends visited the German Bakery for a reunion on Valentine’s Day.
“I was the only person alive at the table; my two friends died,” he said. “It was just minutes earlier that I had changed my table in order to accommodate all friends. The first feeling after the blast was that I had died. I crawled out of the smoke, ashes and debris. As I came out and sat on the road, an old Muslim gave me water and put me in an autorickshaw to hospital.”
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When he reached the hospital, boils had appeared on the body. His left ear was permanently disabled. The hospital staff helped him to call his brother on the mobile phone, and then he fell unconscious. He was in the ICU for 28 days, and underwent three surgeries on his neck.
He was in the hospital for two months, and Aditya Birla personally asked him to move to his hospital in Pimpri-Chinchwad. Later he spent a month in Delhi to get follow-up treatment before going to his hometown in Ranchi.
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Sumeet joined the new firm three months later. “It was a tough call leaving Aditya Birla because of the way they stood with me during the difficult period. Yet, I decided to move on. I wanted to start afresh with the law firm AZB & Partners,” he said. He is planning to start a platform for terror victims and do a master’s in law.
One thing he hates is going to television studios. “They make us look like guinea pigs,” he said. “It seems that for the media I am a story which can be turned into a good show. They simply want to make their programme a hit by arousing our emotions and making us relive those traumatised times.”
