Since then, the hotel has attempted to regain its hip edge through various means including a revamped coffee shop and lobby with a mural by M.F. Hussain and super-specialty restaurants such as the Zodiac Grill and the more recent addition Wasabi, with mixed success. Mumbai today is a global city with space for many, not just a few, luxury hotels. But the Taj is not and has never been just a hotel.

It is the pride of the city, temporary home to visitors ranging from world leaders to rock stars (a casual list of the hotel’s guests over the years would include Louis Armstrong, Mick Jagger, Madonna, Brad Pitt, Bill Clinton, Jacqueline Onassis, Margaret Thatcher, George Bernard Shaw and Prince Charles). For the middle class, it represents aspiration. Mahesh Bhatt in a recent television interview described it as an idea of ‘paradise’. For the poor it is a spectacle; crowds of people often collect near the porch on evenings when stars are expected. And even for those who disapprove of the disparity of wealth, it is a symbol of everything they oppose.

Terrorists are known to choose targets for their symbolic value. In attacking the Taj, they attacked a symbol of history, tradition, beauty, grace and self-respect.

The Oberoi Hotel

Unlike Jamsetji Tata, who was born in a family of Parsi priests and evinced an early love of English literature, M.S. Oberoi was the son of a Peshawari clerk who had to leave a plague-infested village around 1920 to seek his fortunes as a billing clerk at Simla’s Hotel Cecil. The difference in backgrounds and in the times they lived in is reflected in the hotels they were to establish in Mumbai.

... contd.