Atithi Devo Bhava! — the guest is equivalent to God. This was once not merely a tagline but a living ethos in Indian hospitality. Somewhere along the way, that ethos became a relic, and consequently, the meaning of an apology has become a travesty. What was once instinctive, immediate, human, has been hollowed out into something performative. What stays with me from two separate experiences at two luxury hotels in Bengaluru, is not the specifics of what went wrong, but the absence of what should have followed. In both moments, the apology never truly arrived.
In the first, there was a near-accident, the kind that demands, at the very least, immediate concern. But the moment passed in silence. No one stepped forward. No one asked if I was all right. No one acknowledged that something had gone wrong. The silence was not accidental; it was a portrait of institutional indifference. And when an apology did eventually come on a phone call more than a day later, it arrived diminished. Rather than a simple, genuine expression of regret or a handwritten note or even a request to meet me, he said, “Next time you’re in the hotel, give me a buzz and I’ll make it up to you with a spa session. Trust me, you’ll like it.” I replied that he and his team needed sensitisation workshops. And I rejected the charmless offer of a spa session.
In the second instance, the lapse was different but the response was similar. Some months ago, a friend who was visiting from Chennai invited me for breakfast. He chose a luxury hotel as it was a quiet place where we could sit down and enjoy a leisurely meal and conversation. A little after I joined him at the table close to his buffet, my friend became visibly upset. When he arrived, he wanted to sit at a table by the window overlooking the greenery, but the staff told him those tables were not available for service. Yet, he just witnessed a group of white guests walk in and ushered to those very tables. My friend raised this with the manager. He asked why a staff was behaving in a racist manner. The response was not an apology, not even an acknowledgment, it was a flat denial and, remarkably, an argument. I intervened and asked him to leave us alone. He took offence and told me I had no right to ask him to leave. We told him we would leave instead. At that point, someone appeared and quietly pulled him away. We asked for the bill and it was given with a whisper that they had gone for one break-fast rather than two. It was absurd, but we were too shaken to pursue it.
These two incidents involving two prestigious hotels in the country show that something has gone wrong in Indian hospitality. The warmth that once animated these spaces, the genuine desire to make a guest feel seen and cared for, has quietly drained away. Hospitality has lost its soul. In both instances, the failure was not operational. It was emotional. An apology is not a line item in a service recovery playbook. It does not keep you waiting while it finishes its meetings or substitutes with a freebie. An apology, if it is to mean anything, must be immediate. It must be human. It must begin with the simplest of recognitions: We are sorry. What was missing, in both these moments, was that recognition. No one said: Are you all right? Or we should have done better.
What stays as a bitter aftertaste is not the failure of being turned away from the desired table. It’s the silence that followed, and the words that never came. The essence of hospitality is human connection. Without it, hospitality—not merely polished, how premium, how globally benchmarked—begins to feel like an empty performance. It is an acknowledgement of another person’s dignity.
A personal note to close: I walked away from that stumble without serious injury thanks to divine providence and to a regular fitness routine. I recently began doing squats at least thrice a week, and that low- body strength very likely prevented my knees from buckling. Had I gone down on those stone tiles, who knows what the consequences would have been. To those of us over fifty, and most especially to women: please take fitness seriously. Not for aesthetics, not to lose weight—those are secondary. The real reason is far more fundamental. It is for our predictable and for our unpredictable. Stay fit not for the mirror. Stay fit so your body can hold you up when it matters.
Sandhya Mendonca, author, biographer, podcaster, and publisher at Raintree Media, offers a distinct female gaze of the world in this column.
