No family wants to even consider the awful possibility of kidnapping. One writer, however, explains an unusual official technique for battling this horrible event.
The book is called Tremble the Devil and it’s by an anonymous author. He or she writes:
While Yousef was away at school in Wales for his college education, his family returned to their homeland of
Baluchistan, a small embattled province along the Pakistani border that could make the term “war-torn” want to settle down and raise a family. In Baluchistan, kidnapping is so commonplace that signs are posted in public places explaining “What to Do In Case of Kidnap,” and authorities adopted the ironic and unorthodox and tongue-twisting tactic of kidnapping a kidnapper’s kin to coerce an exchange of kidnappees.
Let’s walk through that again. Say your child is kidnapped. Sure, you can try to pay the ransom, but in Baluchistan that’s not a great move. Kidnappings happen there all the time. So you call the police, and they respond with a strategy:Let’s figure out who took your baby, and we’ll kidnap their kid.
This may sound like an absolutely insane idea, but apparently it works. And while the case of kidnapping is pretty extreme, it shows that sometimes you have do something which seems like a terrible approach to do something right. Or: failure is the secret to success.