Restoring the Taj is just part of Tata’s challenge

As guests made their way out of the Taj hotel in Mumbai after spending New Year’s Eve in its restaurants, many stopped to study a small memorial plaque erected to commemorate the 12 staff who died protecting guests from terrorists at the end of November. If it has the same dignified simplicity as a British village war memorial, that’s probably no coincidence. Because within the Tata Group — the Taj’s owner, through a subsidiary called Indian Hotels — the ideals of duty, loyalty, courage and grit, which seem to British sensibilities to come from another era, are still very much alive.

‘There was not a single person who did not rise to do their duty,’ Indian Hotels’ patrician deputy chairman R.K. Krishna Kumar told reporters proudly on the eve of the hotel’s reopening on 20 December. Karambir Kang, the hotel’s general manager, continued to direct the hotel’s evacuation even as his own wife and two sons burnt to death in his private suite, Krishna Kumar said.