Show Notes
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. SIGNAL AWARDS 2026 VOTE HERE Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
More from What I survived
Zoya Phan was 14 when the Burmese army attacked her Karen village in Burma (Myanmar) and her family fled through the jungle towards Thailand. On What I Survived, Zoya Phan tells her story of surviving ethnic cleansing by Burma's military. We trace the roots of the Karen conflict, one of the longest-running civil wars in the world, from British rule to the military coup, and follow Zoya's family from Manerplaw to a refugee camp on the Thai-Burma border. Settle in, get comfortable, and let us tell you the story of Zoya Phan. SIGNAL AWARDS 2026 VOTE HERE Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
In 2009, Australian security contractor Rob Langdon shot and killed an Afghan colleague during a confrontation in Afghanistan. Rob says the man pulled a pistol and that he fired first in self-defence. What happened next would cost Rob seven years of his life.
Former Australian soldier Rob Langdon went to Afghanistan as a private security contractor. He would eventually be convicted of murder, sentenced to death and spend seven years inside one of Afghanistan's most notorious prisons.
After surviving malaria, starvation and near death in the Amazon, Benedict Allen was left with a question he couldn't shake: why had he survived? His search for an answer would take him deep into Papua New Guinea and into a brutal initiation ceremony designed to transform young men into “crocodile men.”
Lost and alone in the Amazon, British explorer Benedict Allen contracted two forms of malaria, including a potentially deadly strain. Starving, feverish and running out of options, the 22-year-old faced a decision that would stay with him for decades.