Rai Bahadur Mohan Singh Oberoi

The story

Mohan Singh Oberoi was born on 15 August 1898 in undivided Punjab. His father died when he was six months old, and his grandfather raised him. He studied in Rawalpindi and Lahore.

To escape a plague outbreak, he went to Shimla and got a job as a front-desk clerk at the Cecil Hotel for ₹50 a month. The company's own account quotes him: "I started off as a coal clerk at the Cecil Hotel in Shimla." His hard work impressed the manager, Ernest Clarke, who later took over the Carlton Hotel, renamed it Clarkes, and made Oberoi its manager.

When Clarke returned to England, Oberoi bought Clarkes Hotel in 1934 by mortgaging his wife's jewellery and all his assets. This was the start of The Oberoi Group. He took the lease of the Grand in Kolkata in 1938 and later acquired the Cecil itself, the hotel where he had started as a clerk.