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| MBD's reticent Sonica Malhotra Kandhari is just a little girl wanting a giggle away from the demands of the world of hospitality.
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On Sundays she doesn't get out of her flats but when we meet for an afternoon in the sun at Olive Beach in the capital, Sonica Malhotra Kandhari crunches across the gravel in vertigo-inducing stilettos.
"They're my power heels," says the executive director of the MBD Group with interests in hospitality and retail. Kandhari represents the new cool among women professionals "" she certainly dresses for the role in uber chic brands, many of which are in talks with the group to occupy its luxury offering, Zephyr, 6.5 lakh of luxury retail space in Bangalore.
Already, the group has extended its footprint to Jalandhar (where MBD Neopolis will launch in September 2008) and Ludhiana (June 2008), retaining its partnership with Radisson (with which it paired in Noida).
In Ludhiana the Porsche showroom will be a bit of a coup for the group which is taking care to ensure that zoning is at the heart of its retail space, scoring over Delhi successes like Select Citywalk. "As a developer, your management decisions on what you are doing to do to make it a hot brand count most," she says.
India's women hoteliers haven't always got there by choice "" Park's Priya Paul rose to the occasion after her father's assassination, and Jyotsana Suri as well as the widow of Charanjeet Singh picked up their positions at the Grand chain and the Le Meridien New Delhi on their husband's unexpected, untimely deaths "" but Kandhari is there after an MBA in the United States of America and has grown into the job of launching a chain of hotels and retail ventures. "If I had done a hotel management degree instead," she muses, "it might have led to a myopic vision."
For someone from a family of essentially middle class values "" her father still drives the business at MBD publishing, the country's largest for academic books "" Kandhari says she's learnt on the job.
"If I was a woman without a background in family business, it would have been different," she shares. "I'm taken seriously because of the credentials of my father, though I've had to prove myself." Her sister has been involved to a lesser extent with the hoteliering side of the business (she supervises interiors) and more with the publishing aspect of her father's trade.
"I've learnt to take harsh decisions," she says of the way she works, "because it's important to grow in the long term. I also like to be disciplined." All of this comes across in her approach to her work and the way she meets people. There is a quality of aloofness, a reticence, that she has not got over despite a half-decade in hospitality.
Still, she insists, "I have fun at work, crack jokes, have a girl thing with the staff around me. I hope people like being with me and not just because they need to be there." But under that façade "" if indeed she does do the girly thing "" is a stern corporate professional. "I inculcate discipline," she agrees, "I maintain a uniform platform for everyone."
A TV crew at Olive wants us to say something about the restaurant on camera, but Kandhari turns them down. "I'm not comfortable talking to the press," she says. That's something she might have to get used to.
If the MBD Radisson was where the group cut its teeth, the ventures in Jalandhar and Ludhiana have taken them some more steps ahead. Ludhiana is now poised to open in June, but it is standalone food court Gigabyte, and the Bangalore luxury retail venture that she insists are "in a completely different league". Already, Van Cleef & Arpels, Fendi, Porsche, Canali and Thanx have signed up for space in Zephyr.
"Mumbai is now on a radar and we hope to announce an acquisition there soon," Kandhari says, "as also in Hyderabad and Chennai." In spite of having its flagship in Noida, the group is also keen on a hotel in Delhi "but land rates are prohibitive". In both Delhi and Mumbai, the group is willing to explore a partnership model.
When she's not working "" and Kandhari is a bit of a workaholic ("but not as much as my father") "" like any 30-something, she enjoys a bit of fun. "I like being pampered, going to spas," she says, "I like the movies, I enjoy swimming." And having given the best part of her day to work, she is pointed: "I don't like to take calls in my personal time."
Meetings with Kandhari are preceded by flustered staff calling to check where you are, and keeping you company while she herself is en route. Still, she says again, "I like time to myself "" laughing, giggling."
That's a persona she hides behind the mask of a professional, but what she enjoys most is "weight training". At her husband Naveen Kandhari's popular Ozone gym? Is she looking at replicating Ozones in her hotels or malls?
"Oh no," she actually laughs, "my husband and I never talk about work." And tucking her stilettos into her Mercedes coupe for a ride back to office before she trades in her giggly self for her corporate avatar, she repeats sternly, "Never."
