Latest news with #Dhyani
New Indian Express
27-05-2025
- New Indian Express
The Pirates are coming
On what was supposed to be a relaxed Sunday, April 11, 2010, Pralav Dhyani, a deck cadet on the cargo ship RAK Afrikana, was engaged in routine deck work after breakfast. His peaceful morning was disrupted by an unfamiliar sound, initially dismissed as a car backfiring. However, when the sound repeated, Dhyani recognised it as something out of the ordinary. Moments later, the unsettling truth dawned on him: the cargo ship was under attack by Somali pirates in the Indian Ocean. This is how the author and 36-year-old founder of ARC Continental FZE, a ship brokerage and consulting firm in Dubai describes the attack on his cargo ship by Somali pirates in his book, Hijacked: A True Story of Surviving 331 Days with Somali Pirates (HarperCollins). At present, a businessman in Dubai, 15 years after the incident, Dhyani, in an interview with The Morning Standard, recalls those turbulent 331 days when he was at the mercy of the pirates. 'The idea of writing the book came to me during COVID-19. The world came to a standstill during the pandemic. People were forced to stay inside their homes. They were desperate to move out and move around freely. At that time, I remembered the days when I was grounded and a hostage of the Somali pirates. I thought of writing and sharing my story to tell readers how I overcame my confinement under gunpoint for 331 days,' he says. Hijacked… perfectly captures the author's state of mind—his helplessness, survival skills, and his refusal to give up hope in the midst of crisis. 'There were of course moments of highs and lows. I did not know when I would be able to go back home and see my parents. I recalled the best moments of life which I spent with my parents and my friends while being a hostage so that I would not lose hope. Not for a second, did I allow myself to think that I would not be able to return,' Dhyani says. The book also focuses on the pirates and their motivations for choosing that life. Why piracy? What were the things he first noticed about them? 'To me, they all looked strikingly similar, except for their different heights. They were extremely skinny, had similar hairdos, yellow-tinted and jaundiced-looking eyes, yellow teeth, and dirty nails. Their lungis and feet were wet because their skiff was tiny…' Dhyani writes in the third chapter of the book. It also talks of the economic crisis of Somalia and that many of its people have taken up arms and gone rogue as a result of economic deprivation. 'It is not right to compare pirates with terrorists, as the pirates were never after our lives,' he says. 'They joined the world of piracy as they were suffering from extreme poverty. The pirates with whom we interacted, were just footsoldiers, and they did this in search of easy money and food. Once they got their ransom, they let us go.' As the days went by, Dhyani remembers noting other details. 'We spoke with a few of them. There was one pirate who exhibited his pride at being Somalian saying, 'Somalia is a country that accepts all sorts of currencies available in the world'. There was another person who was aware of the complete coastline of West Africa. However, there were others who did not know a single thing beyond their country. I found it all surprising—to see two people sitting together, holding the same guns, chatting, with one aware of many things, and the other, not at all,' notes Dhyani. Back home with a lesson After being released, his first thoughts were about his parents and the kind of curiosity that awaited him from people outside his family. Hence, he decided to go to Pilani in Rajasthan to spend time with his close family to avoid unwanted interactions. 'While growing up, I spent a lot of time on the BITS Pilani campus. The place offers a lot of calm and composure. Besides, my extended family (my uncle was a professor at BITS Pilani at that time) was still there. So, I decided to go there as I wanted to stay away from the hustle of metropolitan cities. I was trying to catch up on things. I met my friends and tried to get hold of the changes that occurred in their lives. Later, I went on a vacation with my friends, and after coming back, I hit the restart button. That's when life kicked in,' notes Dhyani. Although Dhyani does not sail anymore, the incident has taught him the biggest lessons of his life. 'It was a test of my endurance and survival skills. It provided me with a mammoth mental challenge that I overcame. It made me stronger. Every time I get into any difficulty, I remember how I handled those moments with patience and care,' he says.
Mint
05-05-2025
- Mint
Facing a Somali pirate's gun on a hijacked ship
On 11 April 2010, Pralav Dhyani was a trainee deck officer on a cargo merchant vessel, looking forward to an exciting career at sea. But little did he anticipate the chaos that befell his life in a few hours. Later that day, armed pirates forcefully boarded the ship off the coast of Africa and took the crew hostage. For the following 331 days, the small group of men who had come from different countries to work on the ship were held captive in Somalia. As the negotiations for their release went on, the prisoners suffered mock executions, mental torture, terror and betrayal. It was the toughest initiation into a life at sea that Dhyani could have expected. In Hijacked , his recently published memoir, he tells the story. The excerpt below captures a vignette from Dhyani's life in captivity. We had just finished our cargo operations in the beautiful island country of Seychelles and were heading to Zanzibar, where my senior cadets were about to sign off and go back home, and new cadets were about to sign on. This would make me and my two batchmates, Shikhar (whom we called 'SK') and Anubhav ('Bade'), senior cadets. I also had a nickname, 'Bonge', but more on that later. We were excited, because being a senior cadet comes with its own perks—think of it like being a final-year student in college. But what we got instead was a situation in which the entire crew of the ship was consigned to the position of junior cadets. Also read: The unknown lives of young Indian freedom fighters Our main engine chose the worst possible part of the ocean to break down, right off the coast of Seychelles, and soon, three or four gun-toting Somali pirates took over our ship. They made us steer it to within a few nautical miles from the coast of Somalia, where we were ordered to drop anchor. In captivity, one spends a lot of time thinking about death. There was fear of having a gun pointed at me, with the threat of the trigger being pulled at any moment. There was still hope that I wouldn't get to experience the feeling. But I did experience it—two months after the hijacking. I stood on the deck, my hands in the air, as one of the pirates pointed an AK-47 right at my forehead, the tip of the barrel barely an inch from my skin. My heart was beating faster than ever; I was shitting bricks as I waited for my brains to leak out of the imminent gunshot wound. In the movies, when someone is about to die, their life flashes in front of their eyes. But when the gun was an inch from my forehead, my mind went blank, waiting for the pirate's next move. My life depended on that one-dollar bullet in his gun. How do I know the price? Because after I returned from captivity, I worked for a company providing maritime security guards to ships navigating the waters that I had been unable to cross safely. A one-dollar bullet was all that was needed to end everything for a person and their family. I looked at the pirate holding the gun. This one always reeked of something other than just tobacco, which meant that we could always smell him before we saw him. The tops of his cigarette packs were always torn, presumably to make roaches. He was a six-foot-tall, skinny, bald, older man with a white goatee, always dressed in shorts or three-quarters, and usually with a bed sheet wrapped around him like a shawl. His teeth were yellow, and one of them was chipped. Even his eyes were yellow, as if he had jaundice. He had an elongated, V-shaped face with a pronounced jawline, because of which we had nicknamed him 'Jafar', after the villain in Disney's Aladdin . He tried hard to be intimidating, though he didn't need to, because he had the gun in his hands. Jafar had been around from the time we had anchored in Somali waters, but we hadn't interacted with him much, compared to the other pirates. He and the others were always eating 'khat', a plant that looked indistinguishable from any other. We wondered why human beings would eat jungle grass like that, and each of us had our own theories about why they loved it so much. Someone said it was good for their sex life and libido, but then we wondered why they were having it on the ship, miles away from their partners. The logical reason was that it gave them a high. Much later, I found out that khat is indeed a stimulant that makes one more alert and energetic, and causes loss of appetite and euphoria, so it helped the pirates stay up during their long hours of keeping watch. It is banned in most countries, but the Somalis seemed to have it incessantly. They wouldn't even wash it before eating, and ate it along with all the dirt it was covered in. Out of curiosity, I once tried it while sitting with the pirates, but just couldn't take the taste after a point. SK and Bade kept asking if something was happening, but nothing did. We came to the conclusion that maybe we needed to have it like the Somalis—chewing it for hours and washing it down with extremely sweetened milk and tea. Maybe that was the key, but we really did not have the patience to sit and eat grass like goats. Excerpted with permission from HarperCollins India from Hijacked: A True Story of Surviving 331 Days with Somali Pirates , by Pralav Dhyani. Also read: 4 new titles to read this summer
India Today
23-04-2025
- Entertainment
- India Today
Gross invasion of privacy: Actor Chitranshi Dhyani reacts to emotional cafe video
Actor, singer, and influencer Chitranshi Dhyani has strongly criticised the recording and circulation of a private moment without her consent. A video, secretly filmed during a vulnerable moment at a Mumbai caf, has gone viral on social media. In response, Dhyani shared a note on Instagram, calling the incident 'deeply disturbing' and a clear invasion of her the viral clip, Chitranshi Dhyani appears visibly distressed, breaking down in tears during a phone call. The video seems to have been recorded without her knowledge. On Tuesday, the actor condemned the incident, writing, "It's deeply disturbing and shameful that someone recorded a private moment of mine without my knowledge or consent, while I was on a personal call and emotionally vulnerable (sic)."advertisementCheck out her post here: Photo: Instagram/Chitranshi Dhyani She continued, "Sharing such an intimate video on social media is not just gross invasion of my privacy, but also reflects the sheer lack of basic human decency. I strongly condemn this behaviour and urge people to respect boundaries (sic)."Meanwhile, some users speculated that the clip was a publicity stunt, while others claimed it was part of a the work front, Chitranshi was last seen in the 2021 web series 'Brawl: The Battle Within'. She also featured in the music video 'In The Clouds', alongside Bigg Boss contestant Abhishek Malhan.
