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.
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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,...
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...
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...
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....
Soul-Sister
Monsoons,
my favorite time of the year when I joined a group of women for a '
freedom weekend' last August. It was a four nights sojourn to Bhainsrorgarh
Fort, a beautiful family run boutique fort hotel just two hours from
Bundi in Rajasthan. We traveled overnight...
In defense of
‘tipping’
My early years were in the service industry working my way upwards and at times I have been so broke
that some money, any money was a blessing. As young people working in a city
with more desires than notes in our pockets, ‘tips’ were our only hope...