{ rude hotels } Aye aye Captain!

Remembering the Leela group's founder, Capt CP Krishnan Nair, as a new biography hits the stands

- VIR SANGHVI

Great hoteliers are hardly ever what you expect them to be. Biki Oberoi may be a legend with the most famous surname in the industry, but he is essentially a reserved and dignified private person who shuns publicity and is rarely comfortable in unfamiliar social settings. Ajit Kerkar was fiercely elusive when he created the Taj group. He would refuse to be photographed, rarely returned calls and was hardly ever spotted at one of the group's restaurants. Nakul Anand has turned ITC Hotels into a luxury powerhouse, but he is soft-spoken and low-key, doing as little as possible to draw any attention to himself.

The exception to this rule was the late Captain CP Krishnan Nair. He never shrank from the public gaze, he made friends easily, he exuded flamboyance and when he entered a room, you always noticed. Captain Nair is suddenly back in the public consciousness because a new authorized biography by Bachi Karkaria has just been published. Reading it, I was reminded of the Capt Nair I knew.

More than any of the other hotel professionals I admire, Captain Nair willed himself to be a hotelier. He knew nothing about hoteliering when he entered the business. He was in his sixties and had already made a fortune in the textile business (he was one of the pioneers of the Bleeding Madras fabric that became such a rage in the US). His only experience of the hotel business was as a guest so, he did not always get it right to begin with. He built the first Leela in Mumbai on land that he already possessed when he realised that the new international terminal of Mumbai airport would open nearby. He patterned it on a hotel he had seen in Budapest (not exactly the centre of the hotel industry, then or now) and aimed too low. Because he had an airport hotel in mind, he tied up with the Penta group whose forte was three-star hotels.

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