P R S (Biki to friends) Oberoi (1929-2023) 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 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.
The Taj Mahal in Mumbai was 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 The Oberoi Intercontinental in the heart of New Delhi was among his first decisions. The Intercontinental Association did not last long, as Biki wanted to pursue his own ideas. 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.
The hotel 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 in Mumbai, adjacent to the then Oberoi Towers (now The Trident) was the extension of the concept of its namesake in Delhi. But the Rajvilas Hotels that opened in the turn of the century Rajasthan added another dimension to uber luxury hotels, frequently listed among the world’s best.
I got to know him as his lead consultant for his diversification ideas, which naturally extended to food. In the mid-1980s, edible oil plants were all the rage. A leading Canadian engineering group offered 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 kept his word that I must be his advisor on all his diversification projects, until the late 1990s when he decided that it was better to stick to the knitting).
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. 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 the same as that of the Jamnagar Reliance refinery; it imports petroleum crude and exports refined products, gaining from the handsome margins in India. That would also have been the case with soyabean. 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 complete hotelier and committed to the Oberoi image, at work and away from it. His 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.
We once travelled to a small Swedish town two hours away from Malmo to meet the Board of the leading Swedish fat processor. It had only one ultra-modern self-service hotel. 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 sole local laundry would open on Monday morning at 10. Biki was stunned into silence, since it was an article of faith for him that the hotelier was duty-bound to immediately cater to every desire of the guest. Finally, the lady found an ironing board and she and I did the pressing, which did not please Biki at all!
A strapping two-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.
The writer taught at IIM, Ahmedabad and was the founder-director of the Institute of Rural Management, Anand
login
who are we?
contact us
qosheapp
Toi Staff
Gideon Levy
Belen Fernandez
Andrew Mitrovica
Mort Laitner
Rami G Khouri
Ali Fathollah-Nejad
Nikkei Editorial
visit website
