HOST TO THE WORLD

Founder of the Oberoi Group of hotels

He would write the definition of luxury with 3,000 square foot suites, but his own first hotel room was a 10 square foot tenement. He was assigned Band Quarter 4 at his first job at Shimla’s imposing hotel, The Cecil. His home squatted at the bottom of the hill, a situation as lowly as his own position there: keeping track of the coal. He would trudge up twice a day, since he came home for the simple lunch cooked by his pretty bride, Ishran Devi. Everything would change in the eight decades during which the colossus straddled a luxe empire of 35 hotels stretching across cultures, time zones, even hemispheres. Yet nothing really changed. Rai Bahadur M.S. Oberoi kept climbing, and never forgot that in reaching for the seven stars, you should never lose sight of the lowliest inventory.

Many other management lessons emerged from the trajectory of India’s legendary hotelier. Without an MBA, he created his own ‘hands-on style’, and ‘management by walk through’. His was no takeaway pizza operation, but he understood quick delivery. At the first hotel he came to own, in 1934, Shimla’s 50-room Clarkes, he devised a lift to carry food from the kitchen to the guest floor. He reused leftover butter pats to make flakier, richer pastry. (This cookie would crumble under later knowledge of food hygiene).

He and Ishran kept a sharp eye on purchases, setting the day’s menu according to the contents in the larder and ice-box. Decades later, almost 90 and stroke-slowed, he got back into harness during the prolonged illness of his son, Prithvi Raj ‘Biki’. He suggested a small adjustment of the hot-water thermostat in the Delhi hotel. The guests didn’t even notice, but it made a noticeable difference to the electricity bill.