Chronicle No. 52 · People
Fifty Rupees a Month: Mohan Singh Oberoi's Long Climb
He took a front desk job in Shimla because nothing else was going. Eighty years later he was the grand old man of Indian hotels.
Mohan Singh Oberoi was born on 15 August 1898 in Bhaun, in the Jhelum district of Punjab, and died in Delhi on 3 May 2002, aged 103. His working life spanned almost the whole modern history of the Indian hotel.
It began in 1922, when he took a job as a front desk clerk at The Cecil Hotel in Shimla for Rs 50 a month.
He was noticed. When Ernest and Gertrude Clarke, who ran the nearby Hotel Carlton - later renamed Clarkes - left for six months, they handed him the hotel. He returned it to them with occupancy at around 80 per cent. In time he bought it.
The rise was not smooth. His lease on the Grand Hotel in Calcutta nearly ruined him when a contaminated water supply closed the building. He held on, traded through it, and kept buying.
- By 1943 he had won a controlling stake in Associated Hotels of India
- The same year he was given the title Rai Bahadur
- In 1948 he founded East India Hotels, today the Oberoi Group
- In 1955 he was elected president of the Federation of Hotel and Restaurant Associations of India
- In 1965 the Oberoi Intercontinental opened in Delhi, India's first modern international hotel
- In 1966 he set up the Oberoi Centre for Learning and Development to train his own people
- He was awarded the Padma Bhushan in 2001, at the age of 102
He is also credited as the first employer of women in the Indian hotel industry.
Oberoi's career says something plain to anyone starting on a rota at the bottom of a hotel: the desk is not a waiting room. It is where the industry is actually learned.
“You must never accept anything that is second best”
Lesson: Careers in hospitality are built by the people who take the unglamorous post and then run it better than it has ever been run.
