The Night Mumbai Burned - Will Pike p2
5/19/202630 min
On the evening of November 26, 2008, British freelance filmmaker Will Pike and his girlfriend checked into the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel in Mumbai for a one-night stopover on their way to Goa. It was meant to be a treat. A single night in one of the world's most famous hotels.
By midnight, terrorists were moving through the corridors executing guests.
Will and his girlfriend barricaded themselves in their room as the siege unfolded around them. They could hear the gunfire, they heard people being executed in the hallway outside their door.
When smoke began filling the room they had no choice but to act. They broke the window, knotted together bedsheets and curtains, and tried to climb down the outside of the building, Will fell fifty feet.
He broke his back, his pelvis, both wrists and his elbow. He was confined to a wheelchair.
167 people died that night at the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel.
Will Pike survived and then came the part nobody tells you about, rebuilding a life, a body and a sense of self when the world that existed before November 26, 2008 is simply gone.
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First 90 secondsJack Laurence· Host0:00
[gentle music] We've all seen this movie. The setting changes, but the story never does. A hotel, an airport, a skyscraper, a shopping mall, somewhere busy, somewhere public, somewhere ordinary, and then the ordinary is shattered. Gunfire in the lobby, explosions in the car park, screaming in the corridors, and somewhere in that building, cut off from the exits, is our hero. Maybe he's a cop, off duty of course, because it's always more dramatic that way. Maybe he's ex-military, Special Forces, a man who spent decades doing things in places the government will never officially confirm. Maybe he's just an ordinary man, a cook, a janitor, at the wrong place at the wrong time. An every man who turns out when it matters most to be anything but ordinary. He takes stock of the situation, tears a strip off his shirt and ties it around a wound he barely seems to notice. Looks at the ceiling and sees the air duct. Looks at the window and calculates the drop. Looks at the fire hose on the wall and sees a rope. Looks at everything around him and sees not a room, but a series of solutions. And then he moves quietly through the air duct, carefully along the window ledge, down the fire escape, across the roof, through a ventilation shaft, that somehow leads exactly where he needs