Story of Narrow escape for Unilever bosses caught up in the terror of Bombay

The terrorist outrage in Bombay on Wednesday became only too real for the chief executive and senior board members of Unilever. They had to barricade themselves in a private dining room at the Taj Mahal hotel and then smash a window in a dramatic escape.

Patrick Cescau, the Frenchman who is chief executive of the food and soap combine, and his successor, Paul Polman, of the Netherlands, were among the guests at a formal dinner party organised by Hindustan Unilever, the European giant’s Indian subsidiary.

The intimate gathering was an assemblage of present and future power at a company that is a titan of Western capitalism, making world-famous brands such as Omo detergent, Dove soap and Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. The chief and the chief-in-waiting were accompanied by another Unilever board member, Harish Manwani, who is also chairman of Hindustan Unilever. He was joined by Nitin Paranjpe, chief executive of the local company.

It was to be a farewell to Mr Cescau and a welcome to Mr Polman at India’s most glittering venue. The hosts, who count among India’s corporate elite, were accompanied by their spouses and it was not until the dinner was well under way that the guests heard gunfire and were plunged into commotion. Instructed by the hotel staff, they turned out the lights and used furniture to barricade the door.

According to accounts in the Indian press, they crouched on the floor in silence as the sound of gunfire came nearer, hoping that the militants would ignore the darkened room. When smoke began to fill the room, they smashed a window for air. Between 3am and 4am firefighting teams reached the windows and helped the Unilever party to escape down ladders.

“It was awful,” a Unilever spokesman said. “They were pretty shaken.”

None of the Unilever party was injured and they suffered a narrow escape. There is no doubt that a different outcome would have been regarded by the terrorists as a strike against a British company that has deep roots in India. Unilever has a big commercial presence in Asian nations with large Muslim populations, such as Malaysia and Indonesia.

Bombay’s stock market suffered sharp falls when it opened yesterday, then steadied as investors took confidence that the Indian economy would not be damaged by the terrorist assault at the heart of the country’s financial centre.

The rupee came under pressure, falling a percentage point against the dollar, and airline and hotel shares plummeted, but the market recovered its composure later. Bombay’s BSE index ended higher, up 0.7 per cent, as confidence rose amid hopes of further action by India’s central bank in cutting interest rates.

Shares in Indian Hotels, owner of the Taj Mahal and the scene of the worst violence over the past two days, fell by 17 per cent as the market opened after a full day’s closure. Jet Airways, the leading domestic airline, and Kingfisher Airlines, its main rival, both suffered share price falls of about 6 per cent.

Palaniappan Chidambaram, the Indian Finance Minister, said that the attacks in Bombay would hurt investor sentiment in the short term, as the Government revealed data showing a marked slowing in India’s economic growth rate. The Indian economy is growing at its slowest pace for four years, with GDP advancing by 7.6 per cent in the three months to September, compared with the third quarter last year. High interest rates, the credit crunch and capital outflows have slowed down the Indian juggernaut and the rate of growth is well below the second quarter’s rate of 7.9 per cent.

Bijal Shah, global markets strategist at Société Générale, said that India’s economy was too large and diverse to be badly affected by the events in Bombay. Foreign investment would quickly return to India, he said, attracted by low costs, the weakness of the rupee and a growing consumer sector. “[The attacks] may have a short-term negative effect on companies wanting to secure the safety of foreign personnel,” he said, “but India is a much more competitive market for manufacturers. Its market share will improve significantly.”

India’s growing tourism sector is likely to be affected, but even that is unlikely severely to harm growth prospects. “It’s not a huge chunk of the Indian economy. India is able to absorb these shocks,” Mr Shah said.

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Original Post:

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/movers_and_shakers/article5254595.ece

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Story of Rachel Cirincione after a harrowing escape

Lying on the floor in her darkened luxury Indian hotel room, Rachel Cirincione heard terrorist gunfire, blasts from grenades lobbed throughout the building, and people screaming as they were gunned down trying to escape.

“You can hear people shooting right in the hall in front of your room. It was terrifying,” the former New Hampshire resident explained yesterday after a harrowing escape from a coordinated attack on the Taj Mahal hotel in India.

As the hours passed inside her second-story room, Cirincione still believed Indian police would rescue her. Then she heard what she thought were people running in the hallway, and she looked through the peephole. The swooshing, crackling sounds, however, were not made by panicked guests but by fires coming at her from both ends of the hallway.

“This was a combination of Columbine and 9/11,” said Cirincione, 43, who grew up in Holderness, graduated from Plymouth High School and still has family in New Hampshire. Relatives monitored her rescue via the Internet.

“The whole thing with people after you with guns and then your little safe house isn’t so safe. If it was just me in my room hiding from these guys, that would have been terrifying enough. Then it turned that wasn’t safe enough.” Cirincione is a tour director with an international tour company. She had completed a six-week training session on how to conduct tours in India and was scheduled to fly out of India earlier last week. Her planned departure had been delayed, however, by an apparent bout with food poisoning. Had she not been in the hospital for a day, she would have avoided the attack entirely.

She recounted her experience in a telephone interview yesterday from her Staten Island, N.Y., home.

“There were a lot more terrorists than they originally realized,” she said, telling her story while the situation at the hotel was still not completely under control.

It has yet to be learned how the terrorists got into the hotel, she said. She noted there was a large wedding party in the ballroom of the massive hotel at the start of the assault.

“I don’t think people realized they were going into (rooms) and taking people hostage right away, but they were,” added Cirincione,

When another explosion rocked the hotel, Cirincione’s telephone went dead. That phone had been her lifeline since the terrorists stormed the hotel about 8 p.m. Wednesday, India time, enabling her to stay in touch with a colleague on the hotel’s fourth floor.

“At that point, I was trapped. Hiding in my room was no longer an option,” she said.

Cirincione opened her door. To the left, the fire was too big for her to make a run for it. To the right, the fire was not as bad, and she knew the stairs were on that side, but she heard gunshots from that direction. Cirincione shut the door and turned to the window for her escape.

That choice likely saved her life.

“In the end, I learned they were shooting people as they were running down the stairs,” she said.

Cirincione smashed a chair against the window, but the furniture splintered into a million pieces without leaving a dent on the double-paned window. The window, it turned out, was welded into its frame.

With smoke now billowing into the room, she took a wine opener from the mini-bar and began chiseling away at the window’s wood frame.

Spotting firefighters out the window, she turned on the room lights and waved.

“They were looking up, but they didn’t see me,” she continued. “Now I know what they were looking at — the massive fireball that was above my room.

“I was able to get a tiny, millimeter opening in the window, and I was breathing through that. I was just trying not to panic,” she said.

Then Cirincione remembered she had an emergency head lamp with a bright, blinking light in her tour gear. She grabbed it and waved it near her window.

Firefighters immediately spotted her and, within minutes, three of them were on a ladder truck outside her window. They smashed it with axes and guided her down the ladder to safety about 2:30 or 3 a.m. Thursday.

Meanwhile, back in New Hampshire, Cirincione’s anxious family watched the rescue live over the Internet. Her mother, Barbara Cirincione, was in her Manchester home when her grandson called her to the computer, where she saw uniformed officers walking Rachel across the street away from the hotel.

“I had no doubt she was going to be okay,” explained Barbara Cirincione, 75, a retired nurse who was part of the prayer line at Bethany Chapel Community Church in Manchester that had been praying for her daughter since she first got word that terrorists had stormed the hotel.

“I just knew people were praying for her,” she said. “Somehow, you just know when God is there and that he is working with her, and that’s just what happened.”

Rachel Cirincione, whose only injury was a minor cut to her hand, said she has handled lots of emergencies in her 10 years as a tour director.

“In my job, you have to be very level headed in an emergency. I work on a lot of exotic tours. … I know that I’m good at emergencies, and that’s why I’m attracted to the more difficult destinations. But nothing prepares you for that,” she said.

“I don’t think I will ever be able to go into a hotel that locks their windows like that,” she said.

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Original Article:

http://www.unionleader.com/article.aspx?headline=Death+waited+down+the+hall+in+Mumbai+hotel&articleId=076e36ec-e6d2-433e-9d59-7579493d4478

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Story of Lucky escape from Bombay attacks for Kabir Ali

Kabir Ali will be for ever grateful for a last-minute change of plan after he came uncomfortably close to the terrorist attacks in Bombay.

Ali, the Worcestershire and England fast bowler, had been in the Taj Mahal Palace hotel on Wednesday afternoon and was due to have dinner there that night. Instead, he went to the cinema and, running late for dinner, was lucky to escape the carnage.

“We were having coffee there in the afternoon and were due back for dinner later,” Ali, 28, said from Bombay last night. “I should have been there by 9 o’clock, about half an hour before the shooting started. I don’t really know why I changed my mind. For some reason, something told me not to go and I went to the cinema instead. I should have been at the hotel.

“I started watching the film, but it soon became obvious something was wrong. It was a really good Bollywood film but people kept leaving. Then I received a text message telling me what was happening and I joined those trying to get out.

“There was panic outside. At first I thought there were fireworks going off in the next street, but then it hit home. There were sirens and bangs and people running. It was chaos.

“I just want to get home now. I do feel shaken, but my thoughts are with all the people who were just going about their lives normally who haven’t been as lucky as me.”

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Original Article:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/sport/cricket/article5248270.ece

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Story of Oberai Chairman who had a narrow escape

East India Hotels (EIH) Chairman P R S Oberoi had a narrow escape as he left the hotel for the Ernst & Young award function in the western Mumbai suburb of Bandra, about half-an-hour before the two terrorists entered the hotel through the front door. The two armed terrorists, who entered Trident around 9.30 pm, first killed three-four people in the lobby before moving to Oberoi, which is interconnected to Trident, and taking people hostage there.

 

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Original Article:

http://www.business-standard.com/india/news/no-financial-loss-to-company-oberoi/00/11/341729/

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Story of Sir Gulam : Eating In Saved his Life

This is the article from The Wall Street Journal:

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Every night since the previous Saturday, Sir Gulam Noon, 72 years old, one of Britain’s most prominent businessman, had dined at a restaurant in Mumbai’s Taj Mahal Palace & Resort, where he was staying. On Wednesday night, he suggested to his colleagues and brother that they eat in his suite.

That decision saved his life, Sir Gulam now says. The restaurant “is the first place they killed people in, it was indiscriminate killing,” says the Mumbai-born founder and chairman of British food firm Noon Products.

When Sir Gulam, nicknamed the “Curry King” for his business in ready-made meals, first heard the shots, he thought it was fireworks from one of the many marriages that happen in Mumbai at this time of year. As it dawned on the group of seven that this was in fact gunfire, the phone rang and the hotel manager told them to stay in and lock the doors.

Looking out of the keyhole into the corridor, he and a colleague saw two terrorists walking past carrying guns. “They were kicking at the doors to open them, and then we knew how serious it was,” he said.

They barricaded the doors with furniture. At midnight a huge explosion rocked the building like an “earthquake,” Sir Gulam said. “In my mind, I thought we are going to see a 9/11 here,” he said, fearing the entire hotel would be blown up.

Sir Gulam remembers looking at his older brothers and saying “let’s be courageous, this can’t last forever.” With the television off, Sir Gulam was getting all his information from his daughters, who were watching the news in London. “They were saying, ‘the building is on fire on the south side on the 6th floor,” he remembers.  His third-floor suite was on the north side, but outside the corridor was filling with smoke.

Soon they began to choke as smoke filled the room. At about 4.30 a.m., Sir Gulam telephoned the receptionist. “She was a brave girl, she was still there. I said ‘we are coming out, whatever happens we are coming out with our hands up,’ ” he said.

But the receptionist warned him “for God’s sake sir, do not take this step, you will be shot by commandos,” he said.

Staying in the room, they were spotted by firefighters, who moved a crane to their window, broke it and gradually brought the party out. “And our ordeal was over,” he said.

Outside they were met by hotel management with water. Sir Gulam, who was born in Bombay and settled in the United Kingdom in 1973, learned that the hotel manager who he had talked to the day before had lost his wife and two children in the fire. 

“All the innocent people caught up this. It is very, very sad,” he said.

 Sir Gulam, who is one of the largest contributors to the Labour Party, said he spoke with British Prime Minister Gordon Brown on the phone. “He said, ‘I’m very pleased you came out unscathed, you must tell me about it when you get back,’ ” Sir Gulam said.

“This was the worst crisis I have seen in my life. Bombay is under siege,” he said.

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Original Article at:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122789498728664699.html?mod=article-outset-box

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