“They grew up together and were inseparable,” said Prasad Bhandari, a real estate dealer and grieving father of Yash Bhandari (23), a software engineer who was killed in a car accident along with his cousin Rutvik Bhandari (23), an MBA graduate, and their teenage friend Khushwant Kishore Tikwani (19).
The three young men died after their speeding car crashed into a pillar at Pond Garden Police Station around 5am on Sunday. The police identified the deceased cousins as Rutvik Vinayak Bhandari alias Om, a resident of Pimpri Gaon with an MBA in finance and working in a private company; And Yash Prasad Bhandari, a software engineer working in a company in Balwadi. Their friend, Khushwant Kishore Tikwani, from Beed district, was a B.Tech student at MIT College in Pune.
“They were born just six months apart. They grew up together and were inseparable. The two were not only cousins, but were good friends. I don’t know how our family will face this loss. Losing a child is the greatest pain for a man,” Prasad Bhandari said. Rutvik’s father Vinayak and Prasad are brothers.
“Bhandari’s family is from Karnataka but has been in Pune for the past few years,” Rutvik’s uncle said. “After obtaining his MBA, Rotvik went to the UK briefly to implement a project and recently returned. He had started working for a private company. While Rotvik was in the UK, the two cousins were in constant contact.”
Pranav Landge, Yash’s classmate in Computer Science Engineering course at BTech, said: “We completed our graduation two years ago. We recently spoke and together we were going to collect degree certificates from the college as we could not collect them during the convocation ceremony last year. We all started working with companies, but we always used to talk about doing something different on our own. Yash was a smart student, even the smartest in our class. Very good in basic concepts and their application.”
Officials said Khushwant hails from Beed and his father Kishore Tikwani is a practicing lawyer in a Beed court. His family arrived in Pune late on Sunday afternoon.
(Tags for translation) Pune car crash kills metro pole
