The Night Mumbai Burned - Will Pike p1

Summary

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What I Survived – The Night Mumbai Burned: Will Pike, Part 1 (May 19, 2026)

Overview

In this gripping episode of What I Survived, host Jack Laurence welcomes Will Pike, who shares his harrowing firsthand account of surviving the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks. The story unfolds through Will’s vivid memories, describing not only the catastrophic events themselves, but also his life before, the fateful sliding door moments that led him there, and a profound reflection on the everyday privileges many take for granted.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

The Invisible Privilege of Mobility

• [01:44] – [03:06]
  • The episode opens with a powerful meditation from Jack Laurence on able-bodied privilege: the unseen ease with which most people navigate daily life, contrasted with those—like Will Pike—whose lives change in an instant.
  • Quote:

    "Most of us move through the world with a kind of invisible privilege... the privilege of not having to plan." – Narrator [02:10]

Will Pike’s Early Life

• [05:36] – [13:15]
  • Will reflects on a carefree North London childhood filled with football, family, and freedom.
  • He describes his “last bastion” of an unpressured 80s-90s youth, the loss of his mother to cancer, and his meandering start in adulthood: university, bar work in London Soho, and a burgeoning interest in creative production and advertising.
  • Quote:

    "I did have the nickname of 'no Skill Will', but I think it was more in jest... I love playing football." – Will Pike [05:46]

  • After being let go from a bar job, Will serendipitously lands an entry-level spot at a film production company, igniting a passion for creative work.

Foreshadowing the Moment of Change: The Photograph

• [13:15] – [16:14]
  • Will shares a treasured photo of himself on a carousel, holding an 8mm camera—a snapshot of youthful optimism and momentum just before disaster struck.
  • The narrator ruminates on how photos taken in ordinary moments become haunting after cataclysmic change.
  • Quote:

    "That photo just encapsulates where I was at that moment. It's energetic, it's vibes in, it's photographic, it's got one eye on the future." – Will Pike [15:21]

Acceptance and Realizations

• [16:14] – [18:24]
  • Will discusses coming to terms with his changed life, his avoidance of bitterness, and how his “barrier-free” past influences his work around disability.
  • He resists succumbing to “what ifs,” unlike others irrevocably changed by sliding door moments.
  • Quote:

    "I'm not full of trauma or anger or anguish or sadness over the way my life has gone. It's more just on reflection, you go, yeah, life was good." – Will Pike [17:02]

Sliding Doors & The Fateful Trip to India

• [20:24] – [24:33]
  • Will and his partner, after a delayed trip thanks to a visa mishap, finally embark on a vacation to India—including an unplanned night at Mumbai's iconic Taj Mahal Palace Hotel.
  • The delay is recognized as a “sliding doors” moment—they were only in Mumbai that particular night because of the visa mixup.
  • Quote:

    "Our whole holiday was delayed by two weeks, so we should never have been there... exactly that sliding door scenario." – Will Pike [20:56]

Arriving in Mumbai: Signs of Security & Calm Before the Storm

• [22:36] – [25:48]
  • Will describes arriving at the historic Taj, noting the unusual presence of airport-style security scanners, and enjoying pre-dinner time with his partner, including time at Leopold’s Café—a site soon to become infamous.

The Attack Begins: Confusion and Fear Inside the Taj

• [25:48] – [32:55]
  • The episode takes a dramatic turn as the terrorist attacks begin. Will and his partner hear gunshots and confusion. They see the hotel lobby fill with smoke, realize the danger is inside the building, and try to make sense of what's happening.
  • Quote:

    "I heard something outside the window. I was like, what is that? Is that a firecracker? ... And I spotted this guy crouching behind a car cowering. And I'm like, it's not right, is it?" – Will Pike [28:12]

  • In the lack of information, Will describes retreating to their room, unsure if it's a rogue gunman or a hostage situation.
  • Quote:

    "It's either crazy gunman who's going to run out of bullets or it's a hostage situation. Like, either way, we need to just stay out the way." – Will Pike [31:29]

  • The chaos of real life under siege contrasts sharply with action movie logic.
  • Quote:

    "You kind of start playing through the scenarios, like, what would MacGyver do? What would Bruce Willis do? … You start checking the panels in the wall." – Will Pike [32:34]

The Cliffhanger: Will’s Brush with Death

• [32:55] – End
  • A harrowing teaser for part two: Will’s attempted escape would leave him “very close to being dead.”
  • Quote:

    "My brain thought I was dead. I think I probably was very close to being dead." – Will Pike [32:55]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Invisible Privilege:
  “The privilege of a body that does what you ask it to every single day, without negotiation, without adaption, without the silent calculus of whether this particular moment of ordinary life is even possible for you.” — Narrator [02:00]
• On Grief and Family:
  “My mum did pass away... She had cancer three times. The first time was when I was like 16... She’d run out of fight and it was, it was tough.” — Will Pike [08:45]
• On Fate and Sliding Doors:
  “We should never have been there... exactly that sliding door scenario.” — Will Pike [20:56]
• On the Unimaginable:
  “We poodle around, got back to the hotel, had a little look at the restaurants... and little did I realize what was about to ensue.” — Will Pike [25:48]
• On Realizing the Horror:
  “As we're looking down, like, you can see it started filling up with gun smoke. You're like, oh, this is here. This is inside the building.” — Will Pike [28:12]

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Major Timestamps & Segments

• [01:44] Invisible privilege of able-bodied life
• [05:46] Will’s childhood, early adulthood, and career path
• [13:15–16:14] The treasured photograph & reflection
• [20:56] The delayed India holiday and its consequences
• [22:36] Arriving in Mumbai, security, final hours before attack
• [25:48] The beginning of the attack, confusion in the hotel
• [28:12] Realizing they are in an active terror zone
• [31:29] Decision to stay put, action-movie logic meets reality
• [32:55] The near-fatal escape; suspenseful ending for part 1

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Tone and Style

The episode weaves together Will’s matter-of-fact yet reflective storytelling, the host’s poetic narration, and a tone that’s introspective, empathetic, and starkly honest about both the mundane and the monstrous. There are moments of humor, grief, nostalgia, and tension, painted against the backdrop of a world upended in seconds.

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This episode forms the emotional and narrative setup for the ordeal inside the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel. For more on the gut-wrenching choices Will faced and the details of his survival and aftermath, listeners are pointed to the upcoming Part 2.

Transcript

[Will Pike]

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[Will Pike]

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[Will Pike]

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[Narrator/Interviewer]

Think about this morning when you woke up. Maybe you hit the snooze button once or twice. Then you got up, swung your legs over the side of the bed, stood up, walked to the bathroom. You had your shower, got dressed, made a coffee and left the house. You didn't think about any of it. You did not think about whether the shower had a seat. You did not have to think about whether the steps at the front of your building had a ramp. You didn't calculate the distance from the car park to the entrance of the supermarket, or check whether the restaurant you booked for dinner this weekend has a lift. Or wonder if the Airbnb you're renting next month for your holiday has a bathroom door wide enough for a wheelchair. You just lived freely, without a second thought. Most of us move through the world with a kind of invisible privilege that we don't even have a name for the privilege of not having to plan. The privilege of arriving somewhere new and simply walking in. The privilege of a body that does what you ask it to every single day, without negotiation, without adaption, without the silent calculus of whether this particular moment of ordinary life is even possible for you. We don't notice it. Why would we? It's always been there. Will pike didn't notice it either. Hello. Hello, hello.

[Will Pike]

Good morning.

[Narrator/Interviewer]

How are you, sir?

[Will Pike]

I'm very well, how are you?

[Narrator/Interviewer]

I'm very well indeed, thank you. Thank you so much indeed for agreeing to have a chat with me. I do appreciate it, mate.

[Will Pike]

It's a real pleasure. Thank you for inviting me.

[Narrator/Interviewer]

In 2008, he was 28 years old, fit, healthy, living in North London, working in advertising. He was the kind of person who could take the stairs and not think twice about it, who could book a last minute hotel room without reading the small print. Who could wake up in the morning, swing his legs over the side of the bed and simply get on with his day. That was until the 26th of November, 2008.

[Will Pike]

And I heard something outside the window and I was like, what is that? Is that, Is that a firecracker?

[Narrator/Interviewer]

He and his girlfriend treated themselves to one night on the way home from a holiday at one of the most iconic hotels in the world. By the following morning, that life, the unexamined, unplanned, frictionless life that most of us are living right now was gone.

[Will Pike]

He told us the main issue for you guys now is the fire. Like the building's on fire, the old partner building's on fire. You're gonna have to start factoring this in. You can't just sit tight.

[Narrator/Interviewer]

However, it wasn't because of a car accident, not because of an illness, but because 10 men with guns got into inflatable dinghies off the coast of Mumbai and started killing people.

[Will Pike]

And then you'd hear another gunshot and it would be a bit louder. It was just a single shot in your life. They're going into rooms and they're executing

[Narrator/Interviewer]

people and those men. And that attack would ultimately change the course of his life forever.

[Will Pike]

It's just overwhelming sadness and confusion because you have no idea what, what this means for your life.

[Narrator/Interviewer]

But before we get to that moment, we must first start at that very carefree beginning.

[Will Pike]

Moon in the sky I'm looking at the moon in the sky this shouldn't come as a surprise But I can't sleep War in my mind I'm trying to fight a war in my mind I don't know who's the winner tonight but it ain't me.

[Narrator/Interviewer]

Chapter one. The crap hit the fan. So I like to start at the very beginning. So sort of obviously born and bred uk. Whereabouts in the UK from?

[Will Pike]

I was born in North London. I grew up and around a place called Frindzy Park. For anybody who knows that, it's. It's sort of just 20 minutes north of King's Cross. I'm a football fan. My whole. Up until about the age of 16, where I suddenly became influenced by the prodigy in drum and bass music, I was basically obsessed with playing football. And that was it, really. I was. I was average. I. I did have the nickname of no Skill Will, but I think it was more in jest. I think it was ironic. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Narrator/Interviewer]

Like when they. They call someone tiny, but really they're massive, you know, it's exactly Little John.

[Will Pike]

Yeah, no Skill Will. But honestly, I love playing football. I was. I was in tracksuit bottoms until about the age of 15. Down where I lived in my home at the bottom of the road, there was a primary school and we used to climb the fence, jump in the playground, play football until it was dark. You know what, it's funny looking back now, growing up in the 90s and the late 80s, it. It's such an interesting sort of point of comparison now with today's kids, right, and where we're as a society. And I very much feel that my upbringing was the kind of the last bastion of kids being able to just go out, be kids, run around, be idiots. You know, no retribution and zero pressure. I don't feel like there was any pressure on my childhood beyond, you know, doing well in school. Yeah, I had a really good childhood. Like, really, really. My family, my mom, dad, bro, sis, we had a really nice little tight thing going on after school.

[Narrator/Interviewer]

Will says he did okay, but he didn't really have a clear vision on the direction he wanted to take his life. So he got himself a job in a bar in London and loved it.

[Will Pike]

And it was a really vibesy place. It was a place called the Institute of Contemporary Art and it had a. They built this new cocktail bar and restaurant and. And then sort of coming towards about kind of nine months into that or whatever, my mum was. I'd a letter from the. My school saying that one of my A level grades had been boosted to a B, So I got three Bs. My mom was like, you got to go university? And I was like, all right, I don't know. So I applied for a bunch of universities without really thinking about a bit like the way I signed up to this podcast and, and I got into them and I was like, well, I'm going to go to the one in London because it's in London.

[Narrator/Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Will Pike]

And that was probably the most stupidest thing I could have done. Because university in London ain't like you being university in a campus around the country. It's fragmented, there's no. It's all very decentralized. The students don't live together. You get none of the benefits of living in campus. It's for basically people who want to come and live in London for the first time. And I was already in London and I had my life and so I made a mess of that degree. I didn't get it because I wasn't really motivated by it. It was a major and cultural studies degree, funnily enough, even though that sounds incredibly lightweight and wishy washy, there were elements of that degree that I still kind of lean upon philosophically that have helped me post injury. It was funny how it sort of tied up later on in life, but at that time it was a complete pointless exercise. I finished up there and got back into bar work and at this point I'm sort of 22, 23 and one of my bar jobs had sort of come to an end. They paid us off because the business was closing and I thought, oh, I might go traveling. But my mum was really ill and so I decided against that. I basically got another bar job in and around London in Soho. Had some great times there, set this place up fantastic. Unfortunately, during this period my mum did pass away, so I'm like 25ish now. She had cancer three times. The first time was when I was like 16. She beat it, come back again, be it come back again. And it was just like she couldn't, she. She'd run out of fight and it was, it was tough. It was, it was probably toughest on my sister because my sister was eight years younger. She was like 16 when she passed away. Yeah, formative years. Whereas I was already kind of quite self assured and she had taught me so much. I benefited massively and have benefited and will continue to benefit from her emotional dialog and understanding. She was very much within her community like this, the sort of, what am I going to say here? Like a key matriarch. She was the friend that people would

[Narrator/Interviewer]

go to, having stayed home while his mother was sick. And through to her passing, will remained working bar jobs in and around Soho. At that time, in the late 90s, early 2000s. SoHo was abuzz with creativity, film production and media. And Will was working in a bar where these people came to unwind. As a young, confident and schmoozy kind of guy, he often got chatting with the patrons about work and I would

[Will Pike]

just have lots of chats finding out what people are up to, what the post houses are up to, what they're producing. Da da da da da. Anyway, this kind of level of chat talked me into a job at exactly the same time that I got sacked. So I got let go. There'd been some thievings taking place, wasn't my fault, but I was the manager. So, you know, buck stops. Yeah, I was let go and I went round to the back of the restaurant and their satin table was this woman called Claire Tims, who was the MD of a production company. And I sat down, I was like, claire, I'm leaving here, I've got a couple of things lined up, which I didn't, but I know how good that sounds. And I said, but I'm really interested to get into your industry. She said, well, funnily enough, our in house runner is on holiday for a few weeks. Why didn't you just come in and do what he does?

[Narrator/Interviewer]

That was it. Completely by accident. Will had stumbled upon his thing and he loved every bit of it.

[Will Pike]

I just, just loved it. I love working with the directors. You know, the way it worked was brilliant. Like, so they had a roster of directors, they, they get scripts from ad agencies and we'd have to put together these pitch decks. And I just got really involved in this pitching process and I really started going, huh, quite like to be a director, actually. So I still, I learned about production. I started crystallizing ambitions to be a director, start entering little short film competitions, you know, that we, we had another runner in the office, another guy called Will Ho is training up as well. And I got quite adept at, you know, doing stuff and it was just a nice creative time. And in fact I started putting together pitch docs to kind of approach clients directly to say we can do everything in house now. We were just getting our feet under the table. We were just trying to figure out this business model. I was calling myself something fancy like creative producer. We were doing sort of sub branding within the organization that I was working for. It was called Bare Films, was the main production company. And then we set up Bear Creative. Unfortunately, like this was just building as the crap hit the fan, so to speak.

[Narrator/Interviewer]

Will goes around giving a lot of talks these days about his experience and his life and how it's changed. And when he does, he puts up a photograph. It was taken not long before his life would change forever. It was a captured moment, a quick snap, a memory filed away. Another frame in the long, rolling reel of our lives, being lived without particular ceremony. But here's the thing about photographs. We take them in the present, but we can only truly see them from the future. And sometimes the future changes so completely, so suddenly, so permanently, that when you look back at a photograph of who you were before, it stops being a memory and becomes something else entirely. It's a feeling of looking at a version of yourself who had absolutely no idea what was coming. It was just living, just being present in an ordinary moment on an ordinary day. Taking a photo because the light was nice or because someone said, smile. And sometimes what you want more than almost anything is to be able to step into that photograph. Tap yourself on the shoulder, simply say, stop. Look around. Feel this. Feel the ground under your feet, the ease in your body, and the total, beautiful, unremarkable simplicity of just being here like this right now. Because it won't always be like this. Now, most of us know this feeling not always from something as violent or as sudden as what would happen to Will. But we will all have held a photograph of a moment we didn't fully inhabit when we were living it. I do it all the time when I look at pictures of my kids as babies. You were just going through the motions. You were just living. And then one day you look back and realize that what you were doing without knowing it, was, in a way, saying goodbye. Will pike has that feeling when he looks at a specific picture, a picture that perfectly encapsulates his life at that moment.

[Will Pike]

There's this lovely photo of me on a carousel, holding an 8 millimeter camera, kind of leaning back, shooting some clips of my partner and her sister. And that photo just encapsulates kind of where I was at that moment. It's energetic, it's vibes in, it's. It's photographic. It's got one eye on the future. It's creative. And I'm like, man, like, I was sort of, you know, 27, 28, but life was good. I was in a new relationship. I just was like, this is it. I'm. I'm sort of living. I'm doing the thing. I'm living in Soho or living in Camden, working in soho, coming up with ideas, executing projects. And it was like, yeah, this is. This is where. This is the trajectory I'm meant to be on.

[Narrator/Interviewer]

And Life had other plans for you.

[Will Pike]

It sure did, man. It sure did. It sure, sure did. It's. It's crazy. It is crazy. And it, and it is the sliding doors sort of scenario. You're like, where. Where would I be? What was I doing? How far would that have gone?

[Narrator/Interviewer]

I mean, you can drive yourself mad with that, though I'm sure you probably did for some time, and you may still do every now and then, but, I mean, you can really drive yourself crazy with. I mean, I speak to people on another show. I do, who are incarcerated and, you know, have had many sliding doors moments. Some of them are in prison now for life without possibility of ever getting out. And, you know, they just, they're full of what ifs. What if I hadn't got in that car that day? What if I hadn't have done X, Y, Z. And.

[Will Pike]

And you.

[Narrator/Interviewer]

You can truly drive yourself insane.

[Will Pike]

Yeah, I think so. Thing is, I mean, I'm not, I'm not overly ru. Rueful or. I'm just, I'm just thoughtful about it. It's, it's. I very much come to terms with my scenario, my existence. The reason why I can do podcasts and, and anything along these lines is that I'm not full of trauma or anger or anguish or sadness over the way my life has, has gone. It's more just on reflection, you go, yeah, life was good. And actually, and I do leverage this in terms of talking about disability and spinal injury, which is that if I'm thinking through a disability narrative, it's not just that life is good, it's that I had never really experienced any barriers. And I, I. It's interesting now because barriers mean something so visceral to me. ACAST powers the world's best podcasts. Here's a show that we recommend

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[Will Pike]

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[Narrator/Interviewer]

Chapter two Leopold's Cafe. So life is simply going great for Will. He has a great job, he has a new partner. Everything is on track. And he and that new partner decide to take a holiday somewhere. Somewhere he'd never been before. India. A place his partner had been and loved. So they booked their tickets and were ready for the off. But of course, every story needs a good sliding doors moment, and this one certainly has one of those.

[Will Pike]

I'm not. I can't accept responsibility for this bit because I, I didn't book the tickets. My partner, I was. Look, she was a little bit older than me, and she'd done a lot of traveling, and also she was a producer, so she knew about stuff, so she should have known. She should have known about the visas. But no, we. We got to the airport and we were like, okay, ready to go? And they were like, right where your visa? We're like, huh, Visa? I mean, just absolute dulloids. Like, what? Go home, Go be gone. And so we kind of like, had to, you know, tail between our legs, go back home. And. And I think the very next day, we were, like, queuing at the embassy and, you know, cracker dawn stuff. And I, I. Bottom line is that our whole holiday was delayed by two weeks, so we should never have been there was the point. So, exactly. That sliding door scenario, We just. Yeah, we just plotted and moved along the beach and stayed in different accommodations and it was just incredibly chilled. I played football on the beach with the locals. We got invited to a wedding that was funny. We were like the only white people there. And suddenly we were like, vip.

[Narrator/Interviewer]

I was gonna say be celebrities probably.

[Will Pike]

It was insane. Like, like 500 people there. And suddenly we're, we're the front of the queue. I'm like,

[Narrator/Interviewer]

So this young, carefree couple had their holiday. They were feeling refreshed, relaxed and ready for home. A journey that would see them stop over in Mumbai on the way back to London.

[Will Pike]

Goa was incredible. Goa was relaxing. Go was everything you needed to be chilled and, yeah, suitable beach holiday and everything. And then we, we, we flew back to, via Mumbai because that's where the flight back to London was from. And I remember just landing in Mumbai and getting the taxi across the city because we were like, we've got a bit of one of those, you know, I think the flight was. We could have chosen to kind of have it within eight hours or kind of like a day or whatever. We chose the day. Kind of like give ourselves a bit of space, book ourselves into a kind of luxury hotel, drove across Mumbai. Chaos. We got to the hotel bit and it was, you know, on the coastal bit and you got Gate of India and this big promenade and the, the, the Mumbai Taj Palace Hotel. Kind of this huge, kind of ornate. Like, it feels like just something here from the Victorian area era. But we kind of, you know, modern bits attached to it. And I remember checking in and it was, it was interesting because they had an airport security scanner where we were putting our bags onto a conveyor belt in the foyer of the hotel. And it was like, that's new. I've never been to a hotel where they take security this seriously. Oh yeah, how interesting. They checked us into our room, third floor up, and we had, we had some hours, like it was still kind of late afternoon, mid afternoon, so we poodled around the area. I think I bought a pair of jeans. We went to Leopold's Cafe. Like we were there few hours before it kicked off. And that was one of the primary targets.

[Narrator/Interviewer]

Chapter three they're inside the building. To understand what happened on the night of the 26th of November 2008, you need to understand the geography of it, because this attack was not random. It was choreographed. Leopold Cafe is in the south of Mumbai. It was founded in 1871 and for over a century had been one of the most beloved gathering places in the city. A sprawling, noisy, gloriously chaotic restaurant and bar that had become, over time, the Unofficial living room for every backpacker, tourist, and traveler who passed through Mumbai. If you'd been to Mumbai, you had probably been to Leopold. It was that kind of place. It was also, the attackers knew, full of westerners. At approximately 9:30 in the evening, the terrorists arrived at Leopold Cafe and would fire into the restaurant from outside, killing 10 people and injuring 28 more. And then they walked out and headed directly to the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel, which was their main target and the place that Will and his partner were staying in.

[Will Pike]

We, you know, we poodle around, got back to the hotel, had a little look at the restaurants. There were like seven restaurants. One of those hotels, like seven restaurants, all different themes. Seafood, kind of barbecue, grill, whatnot. And so you kind of wander around. We're kind of thinking about where we might end up for dinner. And just went back to the room and sort of started getting ready for the evening. And little did I realize what was about to ensue.

[Narrator/Interviewer]

Two of the 10 attackers were assigned to the Leopold Cafe. Their names were Shoab and Nazir. They were young men, and they'd been training for this for years. At approximately 9:30 in the evening, they approached Leopold Cafe. They paused outside and then threw a grenade into the restaurant and opened fire on the crowded dining area, spraying automatic bursts across the main floor. They walked through the restaurant, still firing. They tried a door leading to the second floor, but a customer had managed to barricade it with a table. They exited through a side door onto a side street. They turned east and walked to the Taj. It's less than 500 meters away. A few minutes on foot, two men with assault rifles walking through the streets of one of the most densely populated cities on Earth. The Taj Mahal Palace Hotel was not a random target. It had been chosen with great deliberation. Why the Taj specifically? Because it was a symbol. The attack was designed to hit India's financial district and intentionally target Westerners. A Jewish cultural center and symbols of India's growing international clout. The Taj Mahal Palace Hotel, over a century old, an icon of Indian grandeur, beloved by foreign visitors, was precisely the kind of target that would send a message to the world. An attack not just on people, but an attack on an idea. Will and his partner were inside that hotel. They heard some commotion, but at the time could not have known what exactly was in store.

[Will Pike]

It was. It was strange because my partner's getting ready in the bathroom and I'm just sort of standing in the room putting on a shirt and I heard something outside the window. And I was like, what is that? Is that. Is that a firecracker? Is that a car backfiring Firework? I don't know, man. I've never heard that sound before. It was loud and it was a bang, but it didn't reverberate, like, interesting. And I looked out the window and all the people that be down there, there's like just no one there. And I spotted this guy crouching behind a car cowering. And I'm like, it's not right, is it? And then heard like another bang. And I was like, yeah, that's probably a gunshot. And. And then these sort of bangs just started getting closer and louder. And you're like, it's weird. My partner hurt them. I'll be like, what's going on? Do we think? And we kind of went out of our room, we went along the balcony, bit internal, looked down the huge staircase that looked into the lobby area. As we're looking down, like, you can see it started filling up with gun smoke. You're like, oh, this is here. This is inside the building.

[Narrator/Interviewer]

So could you hear anyone? Was there any yelling or screaming or nothing like that.

[Will Pike]

It was just weird. It was just sort of this weird kind of vibe, you know, where what once was relaxed bustle was now not. Like things were strange in their absence at this point it wasn't, I don't think. I don't. I can't recollect. I mean, screams don't stand out in my memory. Is something that happened at this point. Yeah, Like I remember looking across the stairway and there was another guest sort of next floor up. And we could have kind of caught eye contact across it and we were like, no, this is not good.

[Narrator/Interviewer]

The gunman land at the Gateway of India in inflatable boats. It takes little more than an hour for the men to pan across the city and carry out their attacks. The targets, a Jewish outreach centre at Nirman House, popular tourist spot. Leopold's Cafe. The luxury hotels the Taj Mahal and the Oberoi Trident across the peninsula since

[News Reporter/Additional Sponsor]

terrorists descended on Mumbai's southern quarter. But police have not yet succeeded in

[Narrator/Interviewer]

stopping the dwindling number of as many

[News Reporter/Additional Sponsor]

as five militants are guarding hostages in

[Narrator/Interviewer]

south inside the hotel and they're well armed.

[News Reporter/Additional Sponsor]

Indian commandos said hordes of weapons were smuggled in.

[Will Pike]

And me and my partner turned and he turned and we just think we just went back to our respective rooms and closed the door, locked the door and we're like, okey dokey. It's either crazy gunman who's going to run out of bullets or it's a hostage situation. Like, either way, we need to just stay out the way. We need to stay here to stay put. And so that was our kind of initial thinking, really. We didn't obviously know the scale of what was about to take place because it wasn't just a lone gunman and it wasn't just about hostages. It was kind of like a massacre.

[Narrator/Interviewer]

The attack had only just begun, one that would slaughter 166 people and hold a city in fear for three days and leave Will and his partner desperately searching for a way out.

[Will Pike]

You kind of start playing through the scenarios, like, what would MacGyver do? What would Bruce Willis do? Like what? How have I been taught to manage this situation based upon my upbringing on action movies? And you start like checking the panels in the wall.

[Narrator/Interviewer]

Eventually they would find their escape. But it almost cost Will his life.

[Will Pike]

My brain thought I was dead. I think I probably was very close to being dead.

[Narrator/Interviewer]

Next time on what I Sur Looking

[Will Pike]

at the moon in the sky. This shouldn't come as a surprise, but I can't sleep. War in my mind I'm trying to fight a war in my mind I don't know who's the winner tonight but it ain't me.

[Podcast Sponsor/Advertiser]

Foreign.

[Will Pike]

Powers.

[Narrator/Interviewer]

The world's best podcasts.

[Will Pike]

Here's the show that we recommend.

[Podcast Sponsor/Advertiser]

If you've ever dreamed of quitting your job to take your side hustle full time, listen up. This is Nikayla Matthews Akome, host of side Hustle Pro, a podcast that helps you build and grow from passion project to profitable business. Every week you'll hear from guests just like you who wanted to start a business on the side. If you can't run a side hustle, you can't run a business. They share real tips. And so I started connecting with all these people on LinkedIn and I saw Target supplier diversity was having office hours. Real advice. Procrastination is the easiest form of resistance. And the actual strategies they use to turn their side hustle into their main hustle. Getting back in touch with your tangible cash and sitting down and learning to give your money a job like it changes something. Check outside Hustle Pro every week on your favorite podcast app and YouTube.

[Will Pike]

Acast helps creators launch, grow and monetize their podcasts everywhere.

[News Reporter/Additional Sponsor]

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