Prithvi Raj Singh ‘Biki’ Oberoi, who passed away on Tuesday at 94, inherited the legend of India’s first exclusive hotelier. But the mantle wasn’t his by birth. Tilak Raj Singh ‘Tikki’ was the indulged firstborn, but Rai Bahadur Mohan Singh Oberoi had reluctantly realized that faith was better reposed in the less flamboyant but more solid younger son. Biki stepped down as Chairman Emeritus of the Oberoi Group in 2022, but in his 50 years of de facto leadership, he acquired a formidable reputation for the spectacular — and a pernickety eye for the speck. In their early years of inn-keeping his parents had learnt that you could not build palaces without also keeping a watch on the cost of potatoes, but, with Biki, luxury became an obsession — and the only way to burnish it was to bring to bear upon it his equally legendary attention to detail. It came at a price – and blood pressure. There’s not a single general manager in charge of a project in the making who doesn’t have a story of ‘destroy to create’. “Mr Oberoi ordered the ripping off of the entire lighting of a corridor at Amarvilas, Agra, because the lamps were at the wrong level.” “Mr Oberoi ordered the ripping off of all the tiles of the swimming pool at Vanyavilas, Ranthambore, because, as a whole, they didn’t create the right shade of blue.” “Mr Oberoi ordered the ripping up of the landscape design at the Trident-Hilton, Gurgaon, because the water bodies did not segue into the exotic shrubbery to create one seamlessly evocative mood.” The GM in charge of the gargantuan restoration of Simla’s The Cecil, where Rai Bahadur had begun as coal clerk, recalled, “When I summoned the courage to ask him what the budget was, Mr Oberoi retorted,’ A budget is not your concern. Your job is to create a guest experience beyond compare.’ The pressure didn’t stop with completion; if anything it got more demanding. The boss insisted that GMs personally check 10 rooms a day: “It’s an additional eye, and you should know what you are actually offering the guest.” Biki would walk into a room and know at a glance that the carpet had been ‘vigourously shampooed instead of being washed with a gentle detergent’. His rationale was: “Millions of rupees have gone into creating the brand, the restaurants, the clothes of the GM, the choice of silver. A sloppily placed comma could undermine it all.” Said a target of his famous temper, “He can publicly bring your pants down. But if you want to be a passionate hotelier, his dressing down was a major learning.” Textbook gurus might disparage this style as disempowering micro­management. But the insider opinion was, “Mr Oberoi is like a benevolent spider in the middle of a golden web, with a foot on every thread. The Boss’s unwavering mantra was ‘The Devil is in the details.’ This, like his other shibboleths, was to propitiate the only god of the industry: the guest. So he ordained no noisy baaraats with their “boisterous dancing and grooms on ghoda’. Spa, health club and swimming pool were exclusively for residents, and no amount of influential heave-ho could push open that door, even in New Delhi, which, like most political capitals, seems to operate only on Clout Nine. At Vanyavilas, being on the edge of the Ranthambore jungle is no reason why the guest can’t get his Australian lamb. But all the preserves on the breakfast table are made with fruit grown in the resort’s own groves. So are most of the vegetables and all the greens in your tossed salad. It comes garnished with a yellow flower from the garden. “Is it edible?” you enquire. “Yes, Madam”, replies the waiter, “It’s nasturtium”. Biki Oberoi inherited a world very different from the one in which Rai Bahadur built his empire. With freedom from the socialist chastity-belt came a new high of expectations, and the congenital compulsion to exceed them. He said, “The competition today is huge. Most of the international chains are in India, and it’s not the two-horse race of Rai Bahadur’s early days. Competition is a double-edged rapier affecting both staff and the clients you can draw – or lose.” While sharing insights for a sequel to his father’s biography, he provided a universally applicable one: “Hotels are like showbiz; you have to come up with a new act every time.” He decided that his hotels were not going to be the big, boisterous kind with children tearing down the lobbies, lifts or restaurants. It knocked off a large chunk of customers, but that’s the call he made. He also concluded that right size matters. From experience, they’ve decided on smaller hotels. Resorts should be no more than 125 rooms. You don’t want a hundred people jostling in the pool, or not be able to get a reservation in the spa. City hotels should also remain between 200 and 300 rooms. Beyond that, you can’t maintain quality. In a large hotel, you tend to become a room number. Over the decades, Rai Bahadur had created a stack of manuals to ensure not just perfection but prosaic consistency. However, in the mid-1990s, Biki realized that they were going too much by the book and too little by the feel. Guest interest was being subjugated by the tyranny of the rose stem. Change turned on two pivots, an internal brain-storming, soul-searching, heart­ wrenching exercise code-named Stargate, and an outside-in McKinsey study of the organization conducted by McKinsey study. Arguably, Biki’s most spectacular contribution was the Vilas brand. “We give fantasy bathrooms, often with their own walled gardens. We took a year to develop the right toiletries. There should be an eroticism to a resort suite; as soon as you enter, your mind should start dreaming about what you’re going to do where.” Their ‘Wow’ quotient long predated the Insta diva. Biki came into the ring, donning not the wrestler’s pugnacity, but in the suit of the matador. To understand where he took hoteliering, don’t go to his sharply cut business hotels or sybaritic resorts; go to nondescript Naila village outside Jaipur. Here he created Fort Prithviraj, his very private residence with a very English drawing room, his favored rosewood toilet seats, and liveried retinue serving gourmet canapes at the swimming pool. The gentleman hotelier, in a class of one with an inborn -– not pasted on —- taste for fine cigars and shirts handstitched by gentlemen tailors of hoary repute. With a belief in correctness. With horses, dogs, and his trophy-laden polo team. The industry acknowledges the benchmarks he set, and the benefits he wrested from all arms of the government. Also, the training: Oberoi staff are as routinely poached as eggs. Biki redefined the legacy he inherited. His son Vikram and nephew Arjun have a bigger legend to live up to, and a more temperamental industry in which to do so. Bachi Karkaria is the author of ‘Dare to Dream: A Biography of Rai Bahadur MS Oberoi’