I am not the right person to write glowingly about my experiences in five-star hotels and restaurants. I have neither the taste, nor the turn of phrase. Frankly, I find hotels boring, monotonous, impersonal and irritating. The same TV screen in front, a writing desk on the side, bed in the middle, bathroom slippers that never fit, mattresses and pillows you can never get used to, and air-con thermostats that never work, leaving you either too warm, or cold. So I never even sleep particularly well in hotels, waiting for half an excuse to go back home. In fact, several years ago, when Fatima Zakaria asked me to write a piece on my experiences in fine hotels for a commemorative volume she was producing for the centenary of the Taj in Bombay, I told her I was the wrong person to ask. But when she insisted, I offered to write about my experiences in cheap, small-town, sometimes war-zone hotels where I spent my reporting years and which were enormously more diverse and interesting. Unlike the McDonaldised, or Hiltonised, modern five star. Of course, she was gracious enough to publish it, garnished with cartoons that were brilliant, as you would expect from Mario Miranda.

I met Fatima just a week ago in Delhi, at a dinner for her son Fareed (the Newsweek editor) at the home of her curator daughter Tasneem and son-in-law Vikram Mehta, CEO of Shell and an Express Group columnist. We joked about that article and, even as I filled my plate from a wonderful buffet you could write a whole glorious article on (if you had the skills, and the taste), I told her, and other guests, how one thing I could never get around to doing was write about my experience in fine hotels. Events of this week, however, do not leave me that excuse any longer. Because, of all the scores of impersonal, cold, boring, overdone, mechanical hotels I may have spent half my life in, there is one that has been like my second home, which was warm, lively-yet-quiet, private-yet-not-impersonal, and where I slept almost as well as at home. Warm, comfortable and secure. That is why the assault on The Oberoi in Bombay, by far the finest hotel I have ever stayed in — and I stayed there a lot — is like an assault on my second home. So I have no choice but to write about my experiences in a fine hotel, after all, whatever my limitations of taste, style or turn of phrase.

... contd.