India's Host

In India, where Horatio Alger sagas are as rare as Hindu beefeaters, one of the rare exceptions is the career of Mohan Oberoi, India's Conrad Hilton and a onetime farm boy from the Punjab who started out in 1921 without a rupee to his name. He now owns a $20 million interest in Oberoi Hotels (India) Ltd., a string of 13 hotels, and a luscious beach guest house on the Bay of Bengal that has been host alike to nabobs, maharajas and Socialist Jawaharlal Nehru. Last week at 56, Hotelman Oberoi was constructing in New Delhi Asia's most modern hotel, the nine-story, 200-room, completely air-conditioned Oberoi Intercontinental.

When completed in October 1957, the Oberoi Intercontinental will have an acre-large artificial lily pond for boating, an Olympic-size swimming pool, a glassed-in rooftop restaurant, 20 stores clustered around a patio. Cost, including land and fixtures: $2,250,000. Last week, on a flying trip to the U.S., Oberoi was busy negotiating a deal to bring Pan American World Airway's Intercontinental Hotel Corp. into the operation of his new hotel, match its topflight facilities with equally modern management.

Iron Tubs & Partnership. Thirty-five years ago Mohan Oberoi landed his first job as $5.50-a-week desk clerk in Simla's Cecil Hotel, part of the British-owned Associated Hotels Ltd. At the time, India's inns had no room service, no running water. Guests bathed in galvanized iron tubs and brought their own servants, who bedded down in the hotel halls. Oberoi learned fast; by 1927 he was chief clerk at Simla's Clarke's Hotel, and a few years later bought a one-third partnership for $2,000 down, $6,000 later. In 1933 the Clarkes sold out to their former clerk, and the Oberoi chain had its first link.

Link No. 2 came after typhoid from polluted water killed several foreign guests in Calcutta's renowned Grand Hotel and forced it to close. As the onetime haunt of Britain's royalty and India's maharajas became known derisively as the "blackest hole of Calcutta," Oberoi saw an opportunity. He talked the hotel's liquidators into a low-cost five-year lease, although his total resources were $67 in the bank and his mortgaged Simla hotel. He tore out the Grand's rat-infested plumbing, offered typhoid-worried guests unlimited soda water even for washing, installed well-built White Russian chorus girls in the hotel's three nightclubs. World War II converted the shaky gamble into a roaring business: the Grand began bedding down 600 to 900 Allied officers, serving 2,000 meals daily, pouring 20,000 drinks a night. But profits were low, and Oberoi decided that what he really needed was "a whole chain of hotels."

Profit & Plumbing. In 1943 poor management in the Associated Hotels chain gave Oberoi his chance. As Associated stock sagged from $2 to 20-c- on the Calcutta exchange, Oberoi and some partners bought up 54% of the stock, and with it, Associated's eight hotels. Others soon followed as Oberoi improved his hotels. He put modern toilet facilities in every room, central heating and air conditioning into the Grand Hotel in Calcutta and the Imperial in New Delhi, Swiss, German and French managers--bone-bred hoteliers--into most of his hotels. By Indian standards his hotels are excellent, but by U.S. standards they lag, and Oberoi knows it, hopes the prospective tie to Pan Am's Intercontinental will help.

Today the Oberoi chain sprawls over India, Kashmir and Pakistan, has 1,715 rooms, 4,500 employees, a yearly turnover of 355,000 guests. Profits (before taxes and depreciation) jumped to $1,250,000 last year from $950,000 in 1954. Oberoi believes that the future is even brighter. By 1960 the growing flood of tourists will require another 1,200 rooms in New Delhi alone. In the rest of India, hotel keepers will have to double the number of rooms.

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