Shreekant Sambrani remembers P R S 'Biki' Oberoi, personal friend and hospitality icon, who passed into the ages this week.
P R S (Biki to friends) Oberoi was the doyen of the Indian hotel industry in the truest sense of the word.
He was the senior most hotelier in the country by age and length of service and the chairman emeritus of the third largest Indian hotel chain.
Much more importantly, he single-handedly introduced the concept of luxury hotels in India even when the country was hardly on the itinerary of international travellers with deep pockets and Indian business and holiday travel emphasised economy over comfort.
We had The Taj Mahal Hotel in Mumbai as our token presence among posh hotels until the 1960s.
Biki's father and the founder of the group, Rai Bahadur M S Oberoi, valued comfort all right, but luxury was not his priority.
When Biki took over as the chief executive from his father in the early 1960s, building what was then known as The Oberoi Intercontinental in the heart of New Delhi was among his first decisions.
The association with the Intercontinental group did not last long, as Biki wanted to pursue his own designs of a luxury hotel.
Rumour has it that the Rai Bahadur was not quite comfortable with this new path (Biki neither confirmed nor denied this), but Biki had his way and remained on the best of terms with his father all through the Rai Bahadur's long life.
(Biki once suggested that I should write the Rai Bahadur's biography, but we both agreed that it would lack the required distance. It was eventually done by Bachi Karkaria).
The hotel had very large plate glass windows as one of its most attractive features. That became a signature pattern for later hotels in the chain.
It has undergone complete refurbishing roughly every two decades or so, shutting down for extended periods in the process, but remains the address to be seen at.
The Oberoi at Nariman Point in Mumbai, adjacent to the then Oberoi Towers (now The Trident) was the extension of the concept of its namesake in Delhi.
But the Raj Vilas Hotels (including luxury tents) that opened in the turn of the century Rajasthan bustling with rich and budget tourists alike, added another dimension altogether to uber luxury hotels.
They are frequently listed among the best in the world.
The Taj Chambers was the first club for the business elite, but the Oberoi Belvedere far outdoes the Chambers in name-dropping terms.
I got to know Biki as his lead consultant for his diversification ideas which naturally extended to food.
In the mid-1980s, edible oil plants were on everybody's to-do list.
A leading Canadian engineering group came forward with technology and possible funding.
I was roped in to provide economic and management inputs.
Biki and I soon struck a deep personal and professional bond (he once told me that I must be his advisor on all his diversification projects, a word he kept until the late 1990s when he decided that it was better to stick to the knitting; we continued our personal relationship long afterwards).
One of the Canadians had a Toshiba T1100 portable computer (the world's first laptop) introduced globally just days earlier.
Before long, I had persuaded the Canadians to sell it to me and I became the first laptop owner in the country.
The machine would appear bulky and very rudimentary today, but in 1985, it was just miraculous to work out scenarios using it.
Biki was aware of this and asked me to bring it to his board meeting when I was to make a presentation of the project.
On Biki's suggestion, I had saved the sensitivity analysis on the laptop.
The board members, including such venerables as ambassador B K Nehru and Field Marshal Sam Manekshaw, were completely mesmerised when the 'little' machine answered all their what-if questions with a few quick key strokes.
The happy hour post the board meeting was entirely consumed by their eager handling of the computer.
When the promised Canadian funding did not materialise, Biki persisted with his now keen interest and pursued other possibilities.
We explored tie-ups with European vegetable fat processors, even though their main interest was in fats for chocolates.
We came close to a joint venture with the Indonesian Japfa Group, a giant in the animal feeds and fats industry.
We contemplated a novel concept, of locating the processing plant neither in the oilseed growing hinterland nor near a market, but at a port.
The idea was to import soyabean, process it, and export the de-oiled meal.
The approach was essentially the same as that of the giant Reliance refinery at Jamnagar; it imports petroleum crude and exports refined products, gaining from the handsome refining margins in India.
That would have been the case with soyabean as well.
Biki was completely committed to the idea, but the Indonesians demurred, fearing the newly liberalising India could possibly relapse into a licence-permit raj again.
Biki was a compleat hotelier and committed to the Oberoi image, at work and away from it.
It was common knowledge that the Rai Bahadur frequently read some of the guest comments, but Biki read every single one of them at the Delhi Oberoi and acted immediately when action was required.
He was very particular about what his hotels must look like, what facilities they must absolutely have and how they must function.
He had no qualms about walking away even from existing properties when they did not meet his strict criteria.
Not many would now know that the Taj hotels at Banjara Hills in Hyderabad and the Ahmedabad international property once sported the Oberoi banner, until they fell out of favour of the great man.
He was a close friend of Fatehsingh Gaekwad, the head of the erstwhile ruling house of Baroda.
But he refused to enter into a management contract for a hotel proposed at the main Gaekwad residential palace, the Lakshmi Vilas, because there were not enough bathrooms in the palace and the existing ones did not meet his standards.
He came to Baroda a few months after my association with him began, to examine other properties of the extended Gaekwad clan.
None of them met his standards and no deals were struck (even today, none of them have been converted into hotels).
Much against the advice of his executive assistant, I invited Biki to dinner at our home.
He readily accepted, and ate a home-cooked meal in our non-airconditioned dining room.
He had earlier met my wife Rita and known her as a professional member of my team.
He told her he was utterly bowled over by her culinary skills.
He asked her whether she would share a recipe of one of her family heirloom dishes he had particularly liked and wanted to introduce in his menus.
She agreed readily, assuming that he was just being polite.
She nearly fell out of her chair when a few days later the executive chef at the Delhi Oberoi called and requested her to send him the recipe.
I must confess, though, that I have never checked whether that dish ever appeared on the menu of any of the Oberoi restaurants.
Biki's residences on the farm on the outskirts of Delhi and at the Naila fort near Jaipur (where President Bill Clinton danced with the locals in 2000) easily outdid his hotels in terms of the comfort they offered.
Jimmy Santosa, the head of the Japfa Group, was invited to stay at the Naila fort. Santosa was a veteran globetrotter and no stranger to luxury hostelries. He awarded Naila 11 stars!
When he sent me to meet executives of the French hotel chain Accor, my brief was that any tie-up involving the Accor economy Ibis brand was simply out of the question.
We once travelled to a small Swedish town two hours away from Malmo to meet the board of the leading Swedish fat processor.
There was only one ultra-modern self-service hotel in town. We arrived late on a Sunday evening.
Biki asked the young receptionist if he could get his suit ironed urgently. She smiled and said that was not possible, because the only local laundry would open on Monday at 10 in the morning.
Biki, for whom the hotelier catering immediately to every desire of the guest as his bounden duty was as an article of faith, was stunned into silence.
Finally, the lady found an ironing board and she and I did the pressing. But Biki was not pleased at all!
He was as fastidious about his personal appearance as he was about his hotels. Always impeccably dressed, mostly in bespoke double-breasted suits, he managed to appear far taller than his rather small physical frame.
A strapping 2-metre-tall former member of the President's Guard, the head of security at the Naila fort, described himself as being in the service of HRH Prithvi Raj Singh.
That is perhaps the most fitting appellation for this giant of an entrepreneur.
© 2024 Rediff.com -