sumber inspirasi bisnis: 2008

By ERIKA KINETZ , Associated Press

Last update: November 30, 2008 - 10:20 PM

MUMBAI, India - After the gunmen left, a waiter whispered, "If you can move, follow me."

So Michael Rudder, Helen Connolly, Andy Baragon and Linda Ronsdale crawled, bleeding, through the kitchen of a restaurant at the luxury Oberoi hotel.

The four had traveled to India on a spiritual pilgrimage with their Nellysford, Virginia-based meditation group but got caught up in a series of attacks on Mumbai that lasted nearly three days and left at least 174 dead.

In the same hotel, Charles Cannon, the group's spiritual leader, spent the first night curled on his bed with two of his employees.

Cannon barricaded himself into his hotel room with his two personal assistants from Synchronicity Foundation, stacking furniture against the door.

The three listened to grenade explosions and heavy gunfire outside, "not knowing if in the next moment the door would be blown away and your life would be ended," said Cannon.

They watched as the battery power slowly drained from their only cell phone, the charger stuck in another room. Still, they traded a flurry of text messages with people outside the hotel, the reassurances of an imminent rescue alternating with fresh volleys of gunfire.

At one point, a fire broke out in the hotel, and the room filled with smoke.

"We covered our faces with wet towels so we could breathe, but it just got thicker and thicker," Cannon said.

They broke a window and huddled atop the broken glass, sucking in the fresh air.

"By the time the smoke cleared from the room, we were black, covered with soot and smoke," he said.

They curled up in bed together.

"We just wanted to be close," Cannon recalled. "We stayed there and tried to be as meditative as we could be."

Then the water and electricity went off.

Cannon and his employees rationed drinking water and picked their way slowly through minibar snacks, but by the morning of the second day, they lay in bed, drifting and disoriented.

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