Museum of Stories
From concept to operation, dream to design each destination hotel of the RARE Community is a story worth being told many times, in different ways. If RARE were a physical entity, it would fill multiple rooms with sepia toned photos of heritage preservation, gold tinted handover documents to erstwhile royalty, herbariums filled with many flowering grasses, sketches of iridescent sunsets, voices of happy animals, footsteps of artists, photographers and film makers, art, craft, textiles, books, dreams, hopes and vision….. each drawing you into their stories. Many times you will enter a story, this collection is an ode to every hotel of the community, the destination may be different, but every story is worth celebrating.
Stories
Conscious Luxury Travel
Time to put it out there..... Being sustainable in a consumeristic universe is a tough journey and we have to open our minds to learning every minute. I have known some including myself who were born to thrift , and in a life that was neatly assembled to order, this was manageable and...
Stories
This kerfuffle over a...
Once upon a time two very high brow advertising professionals came over to my office and set up a power point presentation to illustrate how common place and confusing the name of my company was and the tag lines that followed it. One particular tagline ‘It’s about the people’ a...
Stories
The ceaseless flux of...
Years after being perceived as someone who can identify luxury ( as in hotels and experiences ) and collect them under the bouquet of RARE, I must admit that I still struggle with the word . Let me reiterate, not 'luxury' per se but the word and the myriad connotations derived from it and...
Stories
Inhibited to exhibit
Inhibited to exhibit ? For as long as I have been in the travel industry, I have been drawn into this critical argument - to be a part of Fairs and Exhibitions or not. Surely it is entirely an individualistic point of view depending on your brand and strategy. At Rare India we singularly...
Stories
Kuch dikha kya ?
Two questions irritate me. One, after a session of meditation or chanting to be asked “how are you feeling ?”, followed closely by a second one that of being asked “Kuch dikha kya ?” after a safari in the jungles. The former seeks approval for something that should be so...
Stories
Why do we need to see,...
I must have been about 14 years old when on the pretext of helping clean my mother’s kitchen, I willing threw away a beautiful stone ‘aushadi mixer’ – a mortar and pestle,  which according to my mother was over a 100 years old. The moment I dropped  it from our first...
Stories
Spouse Travel
  You could be born a gypsy with travel in your veins, yet to travel with your spouse and to make a celebration of the event, is an acquired skill. And it requires two people to ensure traveling together is indeed a celebration. A couple could be happily married or in a beautiful...
Stories
Intimately Yours
Large big hotels however luxurious are just not my thing and I have stayed in enough to recognize this indifference.  Give me a place small and intimate anytime, and I am on a cloud, wave and a breeze. It’s my kind of vacation. When did this happen ? This shift from wide-eyed...
Stories
Kipling Country
  Anne Wright was one of the founding members of WWF in India. She was also one of the 5 member team selected by our late Prime Minister Indira Gandhi to allocate and identify areas that would become National Parks for Project Tiger back in 1972-73.   Belinda,...
Stories
An Evening to Remember
Ever since I was a kid I was excited about reading stories about jungles be it tracking man-eaters, encounters with rouge elephants or just about wilderness experiences. All of them got my imagination running wild. Whenever possible I would try visit the places mentioned in these books. As...
Stories
Slow down you crazy...
It's been a crazy month  and not all if it has been work. Spending long hours on the computer and phone, exercising, catching up with work at home or even partying is beginning to lose its shine.  It's times like this that Billy Joel 's number from the seventies plays in my...
Stories
An INDIA I celebrate...
Growing up along the southern coast now a part of Seemandhara, it was common place to have music on speakers and almost a wedding like celebration of a neighbor’s daughter attaining puberty. My friends from the North viewed this with amazement not without a twinge of disbelief....