Having postponed his retirement, ‘Chairman Sir’ talks about bonding with the Ambanis, Jyoti Basu, Subhas Bose and more.
You can’t get more colourful than this at age 89. Captain Chittarath Poovakkatt Krishnan Nair is nattily dressed in a violet blazer with bright blue T-shirt and cream trousers. The inspiration for the round-frame spectacle is his political idol, Subhas Chandra Bose. The Hotel Leela Venture Chairman’s “stories” are even more colourful, though, sadly, some of them are off the record, write Shyamal Majumdar and Swaraj Baggonkar.
We are at The Great Wall, the predictably named Chinese restaurant on the ground floor of The Leela Kempinski near Mumbai’s international airport in Sahar. It was the first hotel Nair built when he was 65. He has built six more since then, including the recently-opened Leela Palace in New Delhi’s Chankayapuri, while three more are in various stages of completion.
Nair quickly informs us we are sitting at the same table at which Anil Ambani used to spend hours together with Tina before they were married. He takes great pride in the fact that he was among those who finally convinced his dear friend Dhirubhai that the match was “indeed made in heaven”. The table in a relatively secluded corner with fountains and lush greenery in the background is, thus, close to his heart.
It’s not often that the chef of one of Mumbai’s toniest restaurants stands in attendance while you are having lunch. “Give us your best,” Nair informs the Singaporean as we chew arecanut dipped in honey, with four eager-looking restaurant staff waiting for a signal from their “Chairman Sir”.
Nair returns to his stories, a majority of which concern his bond with Dhirubhai and his “two boys”. He remembers the day in the early eighties when Leela – his wife and Woman Friday – prepared a special prawn dish for Jyoti Basu, then West Bengal’s chief minister, when he stayed in the hotel’s Maharajah suite.
“Jyoti-babu wanted to know who made the dish because it tasted exactly like the one his mother used to prepare. I told him it was a special recipe from Dhaka from where Basu’s mother hailed. I could see how emotional even a stern-looking Jyoti-babu could become,” Nair says.
The prawn dish steeped in his mother’s memory was also good enough to make the veteran communist, famed for his taciturnity, shed his reluctance to meet Dhirubhai — a request Nair made after the “emotional” lunch. Basu kept his promise and met the entire Ambani clan for dinner the same night. That, Nair claims, was instrumental in breaking the ice between the two.
This instinct for timing may be one of the key reasons for the success of Nair, who was born in 1922 into a poor family in a Kerala village, one of eight children of a government bill collector. And the talent was visible pretty early, according to him. He was 13 when the local raja visited his school. After the king made his speech, Nair ran to the stage and recited a poem that compared the raja’s grace to a thousand suns and moons. The raja was pleased enough to grant him a scholarship for the remaining school years.
As the waiter serves chicken clear soup, prawn and chicken Suimai and Shanghai chicken dumpling as starters, Nair asks us not to forget the sheer hard work he has put in. “Till sometime back, I used to sit in the hotel lobby everyday from 3 a m to supervise the arrangements for the guests,” he says.
Apart from sorting out his guests’ problems, Nair is an expert in curing sundry other ailments. Given his good health at this age (he spends 15 days a year in his village home practising Ayurveda), we are inclined to believe him. But Nair proceeds to give an example of his skills — he talks about the Tripura National Congress in 1939 that he attended as a teenager. Netaji fell ill, his story goes, and the fever just wouldn’t subside and even the best doctors were worried. “Then I remembered the age-old cure of applying mother’s milk on his forehead. The mothers of new-borns among the delegates were generous in their help and Netaji became fit enough to give one of his most riveting speeches,” Nair says proudly.
His close relations with the Ambanis was the reason for his public announcement a few days ago that he can always turn to Mukesh for help in case of a hostile takeover bid from ITC, which has 12.9 per cent stake in Leela Venture. We ask Nair about this and he says Mukesh is “an extremely hard-working, kind young man” and would always help his “uncle” should the need arise.
But is he convinced by ITC Chairman Y C Deveshwar’s assertion that it’s just a portfolio investment? Nair avoids a direct answer, but says he doesn’t like anybody using backdoor tactics to grab someone else’s property. “Let Deveshwar set up 100 more hotels — but on his own,” Nair says. The benign expression has given way to firmness.
It’s time for the main course — Singapore vegetable noodles, seasonal vegetables with burnt garlic and grilled sea bass with honey and sesame seed. Nair plays the gracious host and looks slightly annoyed when the steward tries to serve him first.
His fondness for the past notwithstanding, Nair is firmly grounded in the present as well. He has bowed to “family pressure” and postponed his stated plan of retiring as chairman by this month-end. “The Rs 1,700 crore Delhi-property has just opened and the one in Chennai is coming up in September-October. Two more are on the anvil in Agra and Ashtamudi in Kerala. So my hands are full,” he says.
He doesn’t see any succession issues – elder son Vivek is MD and vice-chairman and Dinesh is joint MD – in Leela, despite the problems his close family friends (the Ambani brothers) went through. His logic: The business role of the two brothers and their wives have been clearly differentiated; and the grandchildren are in the process of getting their due roles — one of them will look after the group’s plan to set up 40 budget hotels. Besides, his sons have “informally” agreed that neither would sell his stake to an outsider without giving each other the first right of refusal.
He also disagrees with the view that despite being an excellent hotelier, Leela is dwarfed by the Taj and Oberoi. “My desire was to create India’s most opulent hotel chain with the highest revenue per room. Thankfully, I have achieved that,” he says.
But the hotel chain, which is known for its in-your-face opulence, is also neck deep in debt — at last count, the figure was Rs 3,800 crore (on equity of slightly over Rs 2,100 crore). Nair says he remains an eternal optimist and the group will soon halve its debt by shedding 10 per cent of the promoters’ stake (from 54 per cent to around 45) to a clutch of private equity players and sale of land parcels. Besides, he says his hotels enjoy at least 70 per cent occupancy even during these tough times.
He has gone through such troubled phases earlier as well. For example, work on the Leela Mumbai property was stopped midway when politicians found a new excuse that the height of the 11-acre hotel would hinder flight landings. Rajiv Gandhi, a pilot himself, helped him out.
The man who credits all his success to his wife (after quitting the army, he took over his father-in-law’s textile business), says he began his social life as a communist under the tutelage of A K Gopalan. He was even the secretary of the students’ union and struck work to protest against a tyrannical headmaster. That is now a distant memory for a man who wants to be remembered as the luxury hotelier in India.
As he walks with us towards the exit, Nair can’t resist telling us one more story: Sculptures of silver-plated elephants find pride of place in all his hotels, for one simple reason. During his childhood, his mother allowed him to play with the elephants that used to come to his house regularly from nearby jungles. “Before leaving, they used to embrace me with their trunks,” Nair says, wistfully, which is remarkable behaviour given that wild elephants are notoriously shy of humans. The billionaire has only been too glad to part with some of his millions to pay tribute to his childhood friends.
