Just watched an incredibly moving interview on BBC Breakfast with Mark Abell who was trapped for 40 hours on the 23rd floor of the Oberoi Hotel during the terrorist attacks that rocked India last week.
Other than the obvious horror of having the TV cut off, hearing explosions, people screaming and gun fire all around, and only having 2 small bottles of water and a shrivelled prune to live on, I was struck by his emphasis on his mobile devices saving his sanity and providing him with much needed comfort and contact with the outside world.
Barricaded in his room he had a Blackberry and a Nokia mobile phone – “You can survive for 3 weeks without food, 3 days without water but you can’t survive without people.”
He said he set up a network with 8-10 other guests using email and messaging and received over 2000 messages of support and advice while he was trapped up there.
Yes he’ll have disturbing memories for years to come, but his overriding take away from the experience was that “the world is full of really good people.”
Incredibly those connections came through tiny digital devices.
How on earth did we manage before mobile phones?
