Interview with Vineet Relia, Author of Relax, It’s Only a Raid

Vineet Relia discusses crisis, resilience, mental health, humour, and survival in an honest conversation on Relax, It's Only a Raid.
on Jul 20, 2026

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Frontlist: Your July theme is “The Inner Life of Stories.” Your book chronicles some of the most turbulent moments of your professional life. Looking back, how did those crises transform you internally, beyond the legal and corporate battles?

Vineet: Before the worst of it, I thought a crisis was something you fought and won.
Now I think it’s something you outlast and adjust to as a new normal. What the years of adversity did was make me cold numb to the size of a thing. A serious situation lands now and I feel very little emotionally, however I start counting the downside almost mathematically, line by line, and adjusting to the new position before I’ve had time to react to it. The promoters of the FDI-backed real estate enterprise I was managing had left the country, and I was the senior-most person still standing on Indian soil. Every dispute that had nowhere else to go came to me by default. Much of it was personal, and a fair amount carried criminal colour but I learned to treat even that as a problem to be worked, not a verdict on who I was.

Frontlist: Facing 213 civil lawsuits and multiple FIRs would be overwhelming for most people. During that period, what helped you preserve your sense of self and keep moving forward?

Vineet: Everyone offers you yoga, meditation, breathing. In my situation what actually helped was medicines, and I’m not shy about saying so I went that route and crossed the usual taboo we keep around it in this country. For me they’re maintenance, not a cure, the same way you service a building’s lifts whether or not anyone’s complained. I don’t make a thing of it. What they did was take the anxiety out, and the anxiety was behind everything the rush to file, the need to reply to every notice the moment it landed, well before the first date of hearing. Once that was gone, I could finally learn the art of delay. A crisis like this is a game of patience. Only time helps you outlast it. The rush feels like effort, but it does nothing except work against you.

Frontlist: The book combines humour with deeply stressful experiences. Was humour a conscious storytelling choice, or was it genuinely one of the ways you coped with uncertainty and fear?

Vineet: It was how I got through the days, so it would have been dishonest to write the book any other way. Most of the time I was converting the stress into humour as it happened. The police would grill me, accusing me of having pocketed enormous sums, while in reality my own house was being put up for sale by public notice. The two facts sat side by side and the comedy was in the gap between them. One officer, after I showed him my actual bank balance, gifted me a crate of liquor said I’d be needing it and probably couldn’t afford it myself. He wasn’t wrong. Was I laughing at the system we have in this country? Maybe I was. But the humour was never added afterwards to lighten the book. It was already in the room, usually at the least appropriate moment, and I’d have been lying to leave it out.

Frontlist: Many people experience moments when their reputation, career, or identity feels threatened. What did these experiences teach you about resilience and emotional survival?

Vineet: Honestly, resilience is a grander word than the thing deserves. It isn’t a clenched jaw and a montage it’s showing up the next morning when nothing has improved and there’s no reason to believe it will, and doing the next sensible thing anyway. Everything else I’ve said the numbness, the patience, the medicines is just the machinery that makes the next morning possible. I don’t think there’s a secret beyond that. The people who survive these things are usually the least dramatic ones in the room.

Frontlist: You write with remarkable honesty about setbacks and vulnerabilities. Was there any part of your story that was particularly difficult to share publicly?

Vineet: Early on I thought I was facing something unique I was quietly carrying a kind of victim card, the sense that this had happened to me in particular. Somewhere into the journey that fell away. I started meeting other CXOs who had been through versions of the same thing the sudden exposure, the cases, the promoters who vanish and leave you holding it. What surprised me wasn’t that it was common. It was that almost none of them would say so. Most retreat into a shell and never speak of it, even to people in exactly their position. That was the thing that decided the book for me. The hardest part to share publicly wasn’t my own story it was realising how many capable people are sitting alone with the same one, convinced they’re the only ones.

Frontlist: As someone who now helps others navigate crises, have you found that the emotional and psychological challenges are often harder to manage than the legal or operational ones?

Vineet: Almost always. The legal and operational problems have a structure a statute, a deadline, a sequence of steps. You can work them. The emotional ones don’t cooperate like that. When I’m brought into a distressed situation now, the documents are rarely the hard part. The hard part is a competent person who hasn’t slept, who is convinced the worst outcome is the certain one, and who needs to make a clear decision in the next hour. My job is often just to lower the temperature in the room. The rest follows.

Frontlist: The book reveals how quickly circumstances can change and how fragile success can sometimes be. How has your understanding of ambition, success, and personal fulfilment evolved through these experiences?

Vineet: I trust momentum less than I used to. I’ve watched enterprises that looked unassailable come apart inside a quarter, usually over something that was visible to anyone willing to look. Where a leader once mainly had to survive market cycles, today you have to assume crisis as a condition of the job geopolitical shocks, fraud, extortion, regulatory and law-enforcement exposure, any of which can arrive without warning. So I’ve become wary of the version of success that depends on nothing going wrong. Fulfilment, for me now, is narrower and steadier work I can stand behind, a small set of people whose calls I take at any hour, and the absence of anything I’d have to hide if the file were opened in court. That last one turns out to be worth a great deal.

Frontlist: If readers facing their own personal or professional crises take away one message from Relax, It’s Only a Raid, what would you want them to remember when everything seems to be falling apart?

Vineet: That the situation is almost never as permanent as it feels while you’re inside it. A raid, a case, a notice at the time it occupies the entire sky. Years later it’s a paragraph, usually one you can tell at dinner without your pulse changing. I’m not going to offer comfort I don’t believe in: some of it is genuinely bad, and pretending otherwise helps no one. But very little is final. You count the actual downside, not the imagined one, and you’ll usually find it’s survivable, and smaller than the fear. Do the next sensible thing, and then the one after that. The story keeps moving whether or not you’ve decided how it ends.