Articles by Sheila Kumar

Business

Brush with danger | Review of Kaushik Sridhar’s Kidnapped by Hezbollah

The tagline of the book, Kidnapped by Hezbollah, reads: ‘A True Story of Travel, Turmoil and Triumph’, and pretty much sums up what lies at the heart of the story. This is the true-life account of an Australia-based man of Indian origin. When Kaushik Sridhar decides he needs to visit the war-torn areas of Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, his wife is less than pleased. However, he not only calms her misgivings, he gets her to accompany him, too. And so they head towards a volatile region that has been witnessing sustained unrest for a long time now. Using a direct clean style and precise language, Sridhar tells us how beautiful the areas they visited were, lands replete with history, beauty, resilience. This section of the book is pure travelogue, though of the whistle-stop kind. And then, they stray into forbidden territory (despite having a driver who is a Hezbollah member) and worse, are caught clicking photographs. In a trice, they are surrounded by unsmiling men clad in black, who take away their passports, phones and vehicle keys. There follows 14 tense hours during which their mettle is tested again and again. Everyone is separated, briefly blindfolded and repeatedly questioned. However, Sridhar says they were offered water and that their interlocutors were suspicious but not cruel. After a while Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah (who was killed last year in an Israeli airstrike) himself comes to meet the detainees. This is where the author believes his purposeful responses saved the day. Eventually, being convinced that this was a party of tourists who were in the wrong place at the wrong time, with no ulterior motive, Sridhar and his party were set free. The Sridhar who returned from that trip was a changed man. Within months, he quit his high-stakes corporate job, moved cities, and later, started an advisory firm. The rest of the account has Sridhar relating the lessons he learned from this less than pleasant experience at the hands of the Hezbollah. At times, these takeaways gets a bit repetitive but the overall message is one of positivity, one of taking the odds stacked against you and using them to propel yourself to just the place you want to be in. The reviewer is a Bengaluru-based author, journalist and manuscript editor.