The Pirates Are Coming

N 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.

- AKASH CHATTERJEE

His peaceful morning was disrupted by an unfamiliar sound, initially dismissed as a car backfiring. However, when the sound repeated, Dhyani recognized 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 pirates in his book, Hijacked: A True Story of Surviving 331 Days with Somali Pirates (Harper Collins). At present, a businessman in Dubai, 15 years after the incident, Dhyani, in an interview with