By Sourish
Bhattacharyya
WHENEVER Richa Sharma
of ITC Hotels sends me a 'thank you' text early in the morning for a cheeky story
I may have written about Bukhara, or some other pet peeve, I can feel the
searing heat of her irony. I call her up at once, she makes her point, and then
it's business as usual.
Having known Richa from her days as the country's first
celebrity television news anchor (when Zee News ruled the ratings) to the
present, when she's the national head of PR of a hotel chain that takes media
reports about it a bit too seriously, I know, and I know she knows, that if
there's a more thankless profession than journalism, it is hospitality industry
PR.
 |
Richa Sharma's Facebook profile
picture seemed to me to be a
telling comment on the fuzzy
status of the PR person in
the hospitality business |
It was National Public Relations Day yesterday, so it set me
thinking about the people who keep calling me, texting me or emailing me every
day, feeding my exaggerated sense of self-importance, asking me to review
restaurants or attend food promotions, or sometimes, grace hotel and restaurant
openings, or better still, go on an outstation junket. The older I get, the
less inclined I am to accept invitations to places where I know I won't get a
good meal. Earlier, I would just flatly, sometimes rudely, say 'no'; now, I try
to come up with inventive excuses.
My latest didn't work. The other day, I met this bright young
man named Akshat, well brought-up and polite without being grovelling in the
fake PR sort of way. When he was pressing me hard to review a new restaurant,
which must have become old by now, I said I had decided to stop eating out. He
took one good look at me, laughed out loud, and said, "No sir, that can't
be possible." Well, now that the world assumes that I live to eat, and now
that I have to keep playing this cat-and-mouse game with PRs because I am left
with no other option, let me share my thoughts on the people whom food journos
need all the time, no matter how much we may deny the fact.
Hotel PRs can never please anyone, especially their own F&B
guys, because the human appetite for the spotlight is limitless. Even if they
get the respect of their colleagues, the world doesn't get to know the work
they put in to create stars. As I keep telling Mukta Kapoor of Old World Hospitality, Manish Mehrotra owes a substantial part of his fame to her efforts
to market his exception talents at a time when he was an unknown chef in a
restaurant that used to be empty even on a good day. Yes, I am talking about
Indian Accent five years ago.
In hotels where the F&B guys are bright and
communicative, as in the instances of Soumya
Goswami at The Oberoi New Delhi, Rajesh
Namby of The Leela Palace New Delhi and Tanveer Kwatra at Pullman Gurgaon Central Park, the PRs have to
work overtime to be taken seriously by their sub-set of contacts. Deepti Uppal of The Leela Palace,
though, doesn't have to make that effort. Nor does Deepica Sarma at The Oberoi. But Tanveer definitely deserves a
doubling of his salary because of the effort he invests in popularising his
hotel!
The PRs also have to contend with another, greater, internal
challenge. Their bosses, I know for a fact, are in love with international PR
agencies, because they get gora
journos on junkets to write glowingly about their host hotels after being wined
and dined by the local PR resources. Good publicity in the international media
is worth several times more than the money a hotel might spend to get gora journos over -- and the poor local
resource who put in 16-hour days to wine and dine the junketeers is forgotten
in the afterglow of a splash in the North American and European editions of Conde Nast Traveler.
If the poor local resource manages good local media for free
(which is becoming increasingly hard in the time of paid media), the chefs walk
away with the credit. If a hotel, however, lands in a mess because of a
prostitution ring being busted, or a man deciding to jump to his death from its
17th floor, or an IPL after party going bad, and the name of the place gets
mentioned even once, then I would rather be in a deserted island with Osama Bin
Laden than be the PR of that hotel.
I have lost count of the number of times PRs have called me
to get their hotel's name dropped in a crime story. I have invariably obliged
because I believe that if a hotel did not actively aid and abet a murder or a
freelance escort, it should be left out of the glare of bad publicity. It
should be taken to the cleaners, however, if there's a case of food poisoning
or bad service. Of course, in this day and age of the social media and citizen
journalism, hotels should give up the fond hope of their fair name not being
dragged through the mud in the public domain.
When I first started writing about food, I would be
chaperoned by PRs who used to remind me of my Science teachers in school -- of
course, I was a young man then and would have surely enjoyed their company now!
They oozed sweetness, but they controlled, like mother eagles, access to even
the doorman as if he was privy to some state secret.
In those dreary days, I would pray for an invitation to the
Taj Mahal Hotel because Vandana Ranganathan
(who has since left the hotel industry -- not because of me! -- and even
re-married) could at least share stories (never gossip!) about the theatre
world, which was her second life. Madhulika
Bhattacharya, who would entertain us with her mellifluous voice and her
quirky sense of humour, was briefly the light of our lives, first at the ITC
Maurya and then at The Park, but then she opted for happy domesticity with my
good friend, Aman Dhall, India's foremost
wine importer. L. Aruna Dhir was
another exception who stood out in the crowd till she opted out, not only because
of her exceptional grasp over the English language (she is gifted poet too),
but also because of her unfailing sense of humour.
I don't know what has happened, but as the years progress,
and the industry grows to unprecedented levels, the PRs are getting younger, sassier
and definitely more professional. Some years back, I was particularly impressed
by Pallavi Singh, who manages the PR
of the two Crowne Plaza addresses in Okhla and Gurgaon, after she passed on
information that I had forgotten to add in a restaurant review, and which I had
noticed just as the pages were going to bed, at 11 p.m. She was half-asleep,
but she called the hotel, got the information and passed it on to me. That, for
me, was a wow example of professionalism.
The trio of The Oberoi's PRs -- Silki Sehgal (who I have seen grow in stature, and how!), Deepica Sarma and Mallika Dasgupta -- are textbook examples of professional finesse. Madhur Madaan of the Kempinski Ambience
and Nidhi Budhia of Crowne Plaza
Rohini get my vote for doing a great job of putting their respective hotels on the
mindspace of Delhi-NCR's media-consuming public. Madhur, of course, is lucky to
have Vella Ramaswamy as her General
Manager -- I always look forward to an invitation to dine with him.
Nidhi Verma of The Leela Ambience Gumrgaon is
the other PR whose understated efficiency is complemented by a General Manager
(Michel Koopman), an Executive Chef
(Ramon Salto Alvarez) and an
Executive Sous Chef (Kunal Kapur of
MasterChef India fame), who are pros at having the media eat out of their
hands. Unfortunately, Reema Chawla,
formerly of the Taj Palace and Vivanta by Taj Gurgaon-NCR, has moved on to
another line of business. She has always impressed me with her sunny
disposition and competence at work. It'll be hard to find a replacement for
her.
Before I sign off, and although I have steered clear of PR
agencies, I must mention Neeta Raheja
and Pareina Thapar's Very Truly
Yours, which has a host of F&B accounts. What I like about them is that
they create excitement in their communications about the restaurants they
handle and their juniors, luckily for us, don't exist in some other universe. Their
one-time colleague, Sonali Sokhal,
who now has her own agency, Intelliquo, brings to the table that winsome quality.
And of course, my last sentence must belong to my favourite upcoming PRs
working with impersonal agencies. They are without doubt Muddassar Alvi (Avian Media), Daisy
Basumatary (Perfect Relations), Ruchika
Gupta (PR Pundit), Zainab Kanthawala
(El Sol) and Akshat Kapoor
(Goodword). If their tribe grows, journalists won't ever dodge the calls of
PRs.
