One of the two students who succumbed yesterday to injuries sustained in the German Bakery blast was a Facebook fan of US comedian Jeff Dunham's cartoon character Akhmed 'the dead terrorist'
One of the two students who succumbed yesterday to injuries sustained in the German Bakery blast was a Facebook fan of US comedian Jeff Dunham's cartoon character Akhmed 'the dead terrorist'
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An incompetent bomb planter who blows himself up was a favourite fictional character of Vikas Tulsiani, the 23-year-old resident of the city who was among the two people yesterday to succumb to injuries sustained in the German Bakery blast.
Akhmed 'the dead terrorist,' a character with the physical form of a skeleton created by American comedian Jeff Dunham, would send Tulsiani into peals of laughter, and he liked the character so much that he tagged himself as a fan of it on social networking website Facebook.
In Dunham's act, Akhmed blows off his head because of his clumsiness with explosives. Dunham, who is also a ventriloquist, uses the skeleton to perform satire on the issue of terrorism.
Tulsiani would hoot with laughter every time the ventriloquist mouthed Akhmed's famous dialogue, "Silence, I Kill U!" The line would be delivered whenever anyone dared laugh at the dead terrorist's clumsiness.
This lively youngster's laughter was taken away by the February 13 terrorists, who were not clumsy like Tulsiani's favourite character when they planted the bomb at German Bakery in Koregaon Park.
A final-year engineering student of D Y Patil engineering college, Tulsiani was at German Bakery with a friend. A music lover, he lived in Koregaon Park's Atur Park apartments with his mother and brother Amit, a hotel management graduate. His sister Preeti is a mass media student at Mumbai's St Xavier's College, while his father is a sales executive in Dubai.
Toll climbs to 15
Also yesterday, Rajeev Agarwal, a final year student of Symbiosis Law College, died at Jehangir Hospital after a weeklong struggle since he sustained injuries along with four friends in the German Bakery blast. With the two deaths, the blast toll has reached 15.
Rajeev was from Kolkata. A bright student and popular on campus, Rajeev had started the college's quarterly newsletter Lexnovum, said S B Majumdar, Symbiosis founder-director.
"I was excited to meet his friends in December during his convocation ceremony. He spoke a lot about them and his life here but I wished I hadn't met them today. Not like this," said Rajeev's father Nandkumar. The advocate from Kolkata had sent Rajeev, his eldest son, to Pune to study law five years ago.
"He had applied for internship in a Mumbai law firm and was sure of getting it. He had done his company secretary course while studying law and had leadership qualities," said Shekhar Mishra, his friend.
Rajeev had 60 per cent burns with 80 per cent blood loss. His right leg had to be amputated owing to multiple injuries and both his kidneys had failed, because of which he was on ventilator support.
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